Former Indian premier jailed for corruption

A former prime minister of India and one of his senior cabinet colleagues were sentenced yesterday to three years in jail for corruption, after being convicted of bribing opposition MPs in a crucial confidence vote in 1993.

A former prime minister of India and one of his senior cabinet colleagues were sentenced yesterday to three years in jail for corruption, after being convicted of bribing opposition MPs in a crucial confidence vote in 1993.

P V Narasimha Rao, 79, the former Congress party premier, is the first Indian prime minister to be convicted of criminal charges. He paid 16.8m rupees (about £340,000 in 1993) to four MPs to secure their support in parliament.

His conviction, with that of Buta Singh, came late last month, almost exactly four years after the investigation began into the allegations of vote rigging. Nine others accused in the case were acquitted because of insufficient evidence.

The Congress party had already begun to distance itself from Rao after the investigation was opened and Sonia Gandhi became leader of the party, but the jail sentence will do little to enhance the opposition party's flagging fortunes.

Both men were given two three-year sentences, which are to run concurrently, and they were fined Rs100,000 (£1,500) for their part in winning a crucial no-confidence vote in July 1993.

During the five-year reign of the shaky Congress coalition, Rao and Singh paid off the four MPs from the opposition regional party Jharkhad Mukti Morcha to ensure the government's survival. The charges laid against Singh said that he had been instrumental in transferring the sums of Rs4.2m to each of the four MPs. One of the four, Shalindra Mahato, later turned state witness and became the mainstay of the case for the prosecution.

The judge at yesterday's hearing set bail of Rs200,000 for Rao and Singh to allow them to appeal against the sentence before 8 November.

The former prime minister's lawyers had appealed for the judge to show leniency in view of Rao's long history of public service, his age and his heart condition. The three-year sentence was widely seen by observers as a compromise between six months and seven years, the limits for such a conviction.

Rao took office in 1991 afterg the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi at the hands of Tamil Tiger suicide bombers out to avenge the Indian government's involvement in the Sri Lankan conflict.

The Congress government moved forward quickly to liberalise and reform the Indian economy, a process that inevitably ran into stormy political opposition, which threatened the minority administration's future.

However, Rao, who had also held the post of party president, quit after Congress's humiliating defeat in the 1996 general election.

Rao was earlier cleared in another bribery case, but still faces other charges of cheating a pickle baron, Lakhubhai Pathak, out of £66,000 after promising to arrange pulp-paper supply contracts for India that never materialised.