Prashant Bhushan exposed Bofors, apparently

Prashant Bhushan recently discovered how Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal is not interested in fighting corruption and how an AAP government in Punjab could be worse than Congress. We’d like to go with irony just died, but this is exactly the sort of thing that keeps it alive. More than Bhushan’s remarks on Kejriwal, what got people talking was this retort to AAP’s Ashutosh.

Along with stating that he fought Congress and its corruption all his life, Bhushan also claimed he exposed “bofors, 2G, Colgate, Air India etc”. (“Etc.” Tee hee.) Tweeters were quick to point out that it wasn’t Bhushan who exposed “bofors” but The News Minute co-founder Chitra Subramaniam-Duella. One of them was, ours truly, Newslaundry Consulting Editor Anand Ranganathan. This is also noteworthy because anyone who has ever spoken to Subramaniam-Duella about the Bofors would know that the journalist has always maintained she investigated the case (rather than ‘broke’) it.

https://twitter.com/SShivam34/status/735336380130328576

We reached out to Subramaniam-Duella to know her views on Bhushan’s claim since she is credited with investigating the Bofors kickback story in 1989. She had secured over 350 documents nailing the Bofors corruption. Here’s what she had to say. “He [Bhushan] came to meet me in Switzerland. My husband and I met him. He shared a list of people who he thought were involved. He had no first-hand information – it was almost the same list of people circulating in India,” said Subramaniam-Duella.

She also said, “Mr Bhushan also wrote a book on Bofors in 1990. I am not sure he met the investigators, prosecutors, investigating magistrates and police officials in Sweden and Switzerland who were key to the story,” she said.