The head cashier of State Bank of India’s Parliament Street branch received a phone call on May 24, 1971 which set in motion events that seem fantastic and implausible. Ved Prakash Malhotra believed that the voices he heard on the phone giving him instructions to deliver Rs60 lakh to a courier for a secret mission in East Bangladesh were those of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Secretary P.N. Haksar and Gandhi herself. Shortly afterwards, Malhotra delivered the money to the courier Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala, a former Army officer.
Later that day, Nagarwala was arrested and most of the money was recovered from him. The police said Nagarwala mimicked the voices of Gandhi and Haksar. The matter, it appeared by the end of the day, had been resolved. Only, it wasn’t.
In the years that followed, the case turned into a huge political controversy. It was doubted whether Nagarwala had acted on his own to con the SBI head cashier or if he was a part of a bigger design and whether Malhotra was actually gullible enough to believe that the prime minister had herself called him to withdraw money from the bank for a secret mission. Questions were also asked about the tremendous speed with which the police wrapped up the investigation with the court moving swiftly to hear the case and convict Nagarwala.
The case is largely forgotten now. Authors Prakash Patra and Rasheed Kidwai, through their book The Scam That Shook A Nation: The Nagarwala Scandal, seek to shake the dust off the case files and tell a riveting tale about the mystery that begins with the intriguing phone call and ends with the findings of the Justice Jagamohan Reddy Commission that was set up by the Morarji Desai government to probe the mystery.
The narrative is in the format of a thriller and it is enriched by thorough research, with the authors drawing from police files to documents in the National Archives to the findings of the Reddy Commission and media reports.
Does the book solve the mystery? No. And it may never be solved. As the authors note in the book, their effort has been to tell the story of not only one man who was tried and convicted, but an account where a whole system is on trial, so to speak, in the readers’ consciousness.
THE SCAM THAT SHOOK A NATION: THE NAGARWALA SCANDAL
By Prakash Patra and Rasheed Kidwai
Published by Harper Collins
Price: Rs399; Pages 263