Youth Congress leader Sanjay Gandhi (left) and Smt Maneka's marriage register being signed by a witness Mohammed Yunus (right) as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (2nd left) looks on, in New Delhi on August 1, 1974.
Letting the Italian marines off the hook in a quid pro quo is nothing compared to what happened in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster. We all know how the Union Carbide CEO, Warren Anderson was allowed to leave India under Arjun Singh’s rule (of MP). What some of us may not know is why he was let go. An article in an online American magazine (which has now been purchased by Newsweek) says the following:
On June 22, a spokesman for India’s Bharatiya Janata Party challenged the ruling Congress Party-controlled government’s plan for more compensation for Bhopal victims. More pointedly, he claimed that the late Rajiv Gandhi, an icon of the Congress Party, protected Union Carbide’s CEO in a secret 1985 political deal with President Reagan.
The contention is that the prime minister secretly promised India would not seek to extradite Anderson. In exchange, Reagan allegedly granted a presidential pardon to a childhood friend of Rajiv Gandhi’s, who was also the son of an important foreign policy adviser to the Gandhi family.
That friend, Adil Shahryar, was serving a 35-year federal prison sentence for drug trafficking, wire fraud, and firearms violations, when, without fanfare or public notice, he was pardoned by Reagan on June 12, 1985, the day Rajiv Gandhi made his first formal visit to the White House.
That pardon has never been made public. The Daily Beast asked the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to release details of it, but so far, it has not been released.
“His dad was part of Indira Gandhi’s (and later Rajiv Gandhi’s) cabinet,” says a Florida lawyer, Douglas C. Hartman, who represented Shahryar on separate state arson charges before the Indian was convicted in 1982 on the five federal counts. “He always told me: ‘I will be pardoned.’ And I am just looking at the guy, you know, ‘Right.’”
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley last month twice ducked questions about whether India had asked for Anderson’s extradition, saying such requests are confidential. He added: “If the government of India makes such a request of us, we will carefully evaluate it.” Then, in Toronto for the G-20 meeting, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh avoided the question at a June 28 press conference.
“We will try to ensure that the U.S. government takes a more favorable attitude toward extradition,” Singh said. “But we have not approached them yet. I did not raise this issue in my discussions with President Obama. We will cross the bridge when we come to it.”
The implications of this are staggering. To protect a Gandhi family friend, Congress let go of a guy who was in some way responsible for the deaths of over 3000 people. The Italian marines had killed just two Indians and thus are very small potatoes.
The extremely upsetting detailed report can be read at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/07/18/union-carbides-warren-anderson-life-in-exile.html
Our earlier blogpost on the topic can be read at: http://thenethindu.blogspot.com/2010/11/hamara-mai-baap-kaun-hai.html
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