Wink, wink, nudge, nudge: round up the usual gang of suspects. What the arms middlemen fear the most is peace breaking out in the region.
Some of the responses to the Tehelka.com scandal, presently consuming New Delhi, bring to mind the tongue-in-cheek comment of Captain Renaud, the venal police chief from the movie Casablanca, as he walked into Rick's Café: "There is gambling going on here? Shocking!" Perhaps the scandal will end with another of the movie's famous lines: "Round up the usual suspects…" Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Journalists, scholars and regular defence commentators, indeed most people within New Delhi's inner circles, have nothing to be surprised about with the recent revelations. They have known, indeed could hardly have ignored, the scale of corruption in the Indian defence establishment over the last two decades. Huge fortunes have been made on Indian defence purchases, the most notorious being the Bofors scandal which brought down a government and tarnished Rajiv Gandhi's name forever. And even in that scandal, now over a decade old, very little has been made public yet. No one has been sent to jail for it, no one has recovered the money.
There have been other revelations of corruption in the Indian defence establishment. When the grandson of retired Admiral SM Nanda was eventually arrested for running over and killing a policeman in Delhi with his BMW in the dead of night, scores of stories emerged about the Nanda family, the biggest arms dealers in India. It was reported that Admiral Nanda had decommissioned a number of destroyers on his last day in office as Chief of Naval Staff and on the very next day bought them back for one rupee each. When Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat was sacked by defence minister George Fernandes, one of the charges the former Chief of Naval Staff made was that this was punishment for his opposition to foreign arms purchases. But the Tehelka.com operation is the first time the public has seen an expose of this kind.