Why should we pay for the Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI) to travel to distant lands in search of Quattrocchi when we know that if they caught him by mistake they would probably let him go? What was the point of sending a CBI team to Argentina when their efforts at nailing Quattrocchi were so pathetic that the Argentine court ordered the CBI to pay his legal bills for the harassment caused to this honest, upright man who has never explained why he ran away from India like a thief in the night the day it was revealed that Bofors bribes had been traced to his Swiss account?

If there was any chance of Quattrocchi being brought back and tried, it was when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister and mysteriously nothing happened. The Bharatiya Janata Party appears to have done its best to protect him, so can they stop making a noise now that there is no chance of his being brought back? Why should anything happen now when Quattrocchi’s ex-best friend, Sonia Gandhi, is the most powerful political figure in this government.

Would she want a public trial in which the reason why Bofors money ended up in Quattrocchi’s Swiss bank accounts may well come out? There can be only one reason why Bofors would pay Quattrocchi and that is because his closeness to Mr and Mrs Rajiv Gandhi may have helped the deal go through.

It’s time to forget Quattrocchi but we must never forget Bofors. It was the first time that corruption at the highest levels of the Indian government came to light and so Bofors must be remembered as an important milestone in the decline of Indian public standards.

Since then corruption in high places has reached such heights that it’s almost funny to think we got so upset over a paltry Rs 64 crore going missing.

Is there anything we can do to halt the decline? Yes. If we can make the justice system function as it should the decline will grind to an instant halt. When people in high places realise that they can go to jail for their misdemeanours, they start to behave. But, how can we expect important political figures to be brought to justice when anyone with enough money can manipulate the course of the law?

Last week marked the tenth anniversary of the Uphaar cinema tragedy, in which 59 people were gassed slowly to death because the cinema owners failed to provide minimum standards of safety. The victims died slow, painful deaths because they were locked into the cinema as it filled up with poison gas. The owners of the cinema are out on bail and their lawyers have been remarkably clever at delaying the process of justice in a system that works too slowly at the best of times.

That the sentencing in the 1993 bomb blasts case has taken several months speaks for itself. Why should sentencing not take months when it has taken fifteen years for the trial to be completed?

The only people who fear our justice system are the weakest of our citizens. People like Shaji Nair, who was acquitted by the Bombay High Court last week on the last day of serving a full seven-year term for attempted robbery. Shaji Nair was 21 years old when he was locked up on the flimsiest of grounds. Someone complained that he had been attacked and Shaji was picked up by the police in the vicinity of the attack because he happened to have a knife on him. He was working as a waiter at the time and pleaded his

innocence, but he could not afford a lawyer so he remained in jail. It turns out now that he was innocent but he has already served his sentence. Will the Indian state compensate him for stealing seven years of his life?

Indian jails are filled with men like Shaji Nair. Their stories appear in the press every now and then but mostly they remain forgotten. It’s great that the judiciary is so eager to keep the executive and legislative branches of government on their toes, but who is going to make the judges look in their own backyard? As long as the justice system remains the way it is, men like Shaji Nair will rot in jail and men like Ottavio Quattrocchi will walk free.