Bofors vs Kandahar

Congress President Sonia Gandhi never fails to remind audiences that a senior BJP minister had flown four terrorists to Kandahar, in order to make the point that the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate LK Advani is not as ‘mazboot’ (strong) as he claims. The BJP plans to counter this by talking of the decision of two Congress prime ministers to first allow Italian middleman Ottavio Quattrocchi to leave India and then allow him to get access to his money — Quattrocchi was allowed to flee the country even though there was an arrest warrant in his name during Narasimha Rao’s prime ministership; while the NDA had managed to freeze the money that Quattrocchi had allegedly got from Bofors, the UPA allowed the money to be released.