Sometimes, one story can span an entire career or that career can be dominated by one story. That was the case with Chitra Subramaniam and her decade-long investigation into the Bofors bribery scam. The story broke in 1987 via broadcasts of the Swedish state radio and subsequently through Subramaniam’s exposes, first, in The Hindu and later in The Indian Express and The Statesman.
In her upcoming book Bofors Gate (published by Juggernaut), one refrain that runs through as her major regret: the box/boxes with between 500-1,000 pages of secret Swiss documents — sent to India in 1997 — remain unopened.
The documents were handed over to then Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Director Joginder Singh at a public ceremony in Bern (Subramaniam was present). It is not clear whether there were one or two boxes.
The book has over a dozen references to the “unopened boxes” with the author writing, “Over the years, politicians have told me that the closed box serves them better than if it was opened. I find these arguments shocking because they strike at the very core of what my country is…I believe the time is not far when the box in India will be opened on public demand.”
Sparking a potential controversy, Subramaniam has written that while the documents were transferred to India in 1997, they remained unopened in 2025. She asserts, “No political party has had the courage to open them for fear of finding out what they contain — not even the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that rode to power in 2014, on the promise that the corrupt would be booked and that Indian taxpayers would finally know the truth…”
Again: “India’s premier investigative agency pretended the boxes with the secret documents from Switzerland have never been opened to date, and successive governments have used the ‘closed’ boxes as political football without a care for the truth, or for the self-respect of a nation.”
She also describes the boxes as the “elephant in the room” and concludes, “Considering Bofors and corruption made political careers and won elections for the opposition, their inability to look at the documents raises many questions, the most important one being: who gains most from the silence on the documents?’’
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And the last, definitive sentence of the book: “The unopened boxes with the CBI contain the self-respect of India.”
The CBI had ploughed through its Bofors case for 21 years and finally closed the case in 2011. While defendants like Win Chadha and Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi and many of the key members of the CBI’s probe team (including then Director Joginder Singh) are no more, others recall that the secret Swiss documents sent to India in 1997 were pivotal to the chargesheet they filed in 1999.
They, thus, contradict assertions made in the book.
Among those who spoke to The Indian Express was O P Galhotra, who was the Superintendent of Police (SP) assigned to the Bofors case and went on to become the agency’s Joint Director. He said: “I joined the team soon after the documents had been handed over to the CBI and the payments detailed in formed the very basis for filing the charges against Ottavio Quattrocchi and the Hinduja brothers. It was because of the details in the documents, for instance, that the Hindujas joined the investigation in India. The boxes were very much opened.’’
Another key member of the CBI probe team in the Bofors case was N R Wasan, Deputy Inspector General (DIG), who had handled the case for 15 years. He told The Indian Express that after the Director brought them, the boxes were carried to the chamber of the Additional Sessions Judge Ajit Bharihoke in the Tis Hazari Court, opened by the judge and then handed over to the CBI as case property.
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He recalled, “The secret documents were a court-to-court transfer between Switzerland and India in 1997 and were therefore addressed to the designated court. The seals were opened in front of the designated judge and then handed over to us for the investigation. The documents were invaluable for the CBI for filing the charge sheets since they contained the entire money trail and every banking transaction.”
When told about this response from CBI investigators, Subramaniam told The Indian Express: “Bofors was not an ordinary case. In India, it brought a Government down and in Switzerland, laws were modified as a result of the investigation. The CBI should have told us what they found and shared the information with us. Why was it all done so quietly?’’
Her book details how the story blurred the line between her professional and personal. For instance, she describes how in 1990, when she was in hot pursuit of the kickback recipients, whenever the phone rang at home, her four-year-old son Nikhil would shout, “Mummy, Bofors speaking.”