Editor's Pick

ON 2 MAY 1996, a Central Bureau of Investigation team in Madras arrested the astrologer and mystic Nemichand Jain—popularly known as Chandraswami, seen here arriving for a hearing, the following month, at Delhi’s Patiala House court. He was charged with defrauding Lakhubhai Pathak, a London-based businessman who claimed to have given him $100,000, in 1984, as a kickback for PV Narasimha Rao, the foreign minister at the time, in order to secure a contract to supply newsprint.

Chandraswami met Rao in 1971 and became his spiritual advisor. He also secured patronage from several prominent politicians, as well as from foreign leaders such as the future British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the sultan of Brunei and the president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. After being elected prime minister, in 1991, Rao frequently consulted Chandraswami before taking major decisions.

Such proximity to power brought with it a series of controversies. In 1987, the Enforcement Directorate investigated Chandraswami for alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. The following year, the income tax department raided his ashram, reportedly unearthing documents linking him to international arms deals. After the 1989 general election, he was charged with forging documents about Prime Minister VP Singh’s son opening a bank account in the Caribbean tax haven of St Kitts and Nevis.

SK Jain, an industrialist at the centre of a major money-laundering case, claimed during a magisterial interrogation that Chandraswami had facilitated at least six meetings with Rao and was the conduit for bribes worth Rs 2.5 crore. A disgruntled aide—and, later, the Congress—told the MC Jain commission that Chandraswami had financed the assassination of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, while an arrested associate of Dawood Ibrahim accused him of having sheltered the gangster from the police. After years of fighting the many cases against him, Chandraswami died, in relative obscurity, in 2017.