Ironically, the revelation of the identity of 'Deep Throat' as Mark Felt, a former FBI deputy director whose inputs enabled Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigating the Watergate scandal to nail president Richard Nixon, coincided with the virtual burying of the notorious Bofors scandal in India. 'Follow the money' was Felt's advice. In the Bofors case, however, the trail has run cold.

Yet, although no one has been found guilty, the suspicions remain. Any sense of relief, therefore, of the kind that the Congress has been feeling is premature. It is obvious that the party's reputation has received a permanent stain, which it can never hope to eradicate. Whenever a new scam makes the headlines, or an arms deal is negotiated, the name of the Swedish howitzer company is bound to crop up.

Why does Bofors have such resonance? After all, the Congress is not a stranger to such hints of political skullduggery, as the jeep purchase scandal of an earlier period testifies.

The reason perhaps is that the scandal surfaced at a time when the vulnerability of the Congress was becoming apparent for the first time. During the earlier scandals, the Congress still had the image and durability to ensure that it suffered no major political setback. The opposition, too, was too weak to exploit any allegations of corruption that may have come to light.

In 1987, however, when the charges about the shady transactions involving the howitzer deal were first made by the Swedish radio - and were immediately brushed aside by the Rajiv Gandhi government - the Congress was on a perceptibly weak wicket despite its massive 415-member presence in the Lok Sabha. Two years prior to the Bofors disclosure, the party had succumbed to Muslim fundamentalist pressure to negate the Supreme Court's Shah Bano judgement on alimony, thereby initiating a chain of events that led to the BJP's rise during the 90s.

But that was still in the future. The Congress's 1989 defeat was not due to the BJP, although the latter had already started to make enormous political gains, but was the result of a debilitating split in the Congress's own ranks, which saw V.P. Singh break away - he later become prime minister - on the Bofors issue. Although the Congress did manage to return to power in 1991, the blow it received in 1989 marked the beginning of its decline from which it has yet to recover.

From this standpoint, the Bofors scandal will continue to haunt the Congress till - if at all - it fully recovers in the sense of being in a position to attain a majority of its own in the Lok Sabha. But if it continues to remain, as at present, as the first party of a coalition, then the vastly reduced status of the Grand Old Party will be ascribed to Bofors. Just as the Babri mosque demolition case is the albatross round the BJP's neck, the Bofors is the same for the Congress.

It is obvious, therefore, that all the strenuous efforts the Congress made in insisting that the deal was above board have been fruitless. No one was convinced, least of all its allies in the present coalition who have been hinting at the alleged pressure put on the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to go easy on the investigations. Among the other attempts to unearth the truth was an investigation by a joint parliamentary committee, but its failure to name the suspects was perhaps the first indication of the virtual impossibility of finding the guilty. As much was also proved by the failure of successive non-Congress governments led by V.P. Singh and then by the BJP to bring the case to a close. Obviously, the recipients of the money did not leave signed receipts.

But even as seeming efforts were being made to trace the culprits, the Rajiv Gandhi government, in an act reminiscent of the emergency regime of his mother Indira Gandhi, tried to reintroduce censorship through a Publication of Objectionable Materials Act (POMA) so that at least the names of the suspects could not be aired. However, sense prevailed in the end and the ruling party did not persist with this folly. By then, of course, the intriguing entries in Bofors chief Martin Ardbo's diary about 'Nero' and 'Gandhi trust(e) lawyer' were known all over the country.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the last acts of the unedifying drama have proved to be farcical, with the CBI being accused by the judiciary of presenting documents which could not be taken seriously as they were mere photocopies while the Swiss authorities had maintained that the lapse of time prevented them from taking any further steps in the matter.

Was the lapse of time deliberate?

After all, justice delayed is justice denied. Such dilatory tactics may have been followed in Rajiv Gandhi's time as well as when Chandra Shekhar and P.V. Narasimha Rao were prime ministers. But there is little to suggest that any sense of urgency was shown when the BJP was in power if one excludes the H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral regimes for being too conscious of their fragility (apart from their dependence on the Congress) to worry about Bofors. Only in the first few months of V.P. Singh was some urgency shown, if only because he had won the election on the Bofors plank. But then he became too involved in his own battles of survival to persist.

That does not mean, however, that the ghost of Bofors has been exorcised. It will continue to haunt not only the Congress but the entire political class since their inability to find the culprits show that no one was serious about such a major case of corruption. Most people will feel that their failure was not inadvertent. The law in India does not always seem to follow its own course.

(Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)