A former Soviet ambassador to India on Monday rubbished charges that the then prime minister Indira Gandhi and her Congress party accepted money from the KGB.
The ambassador, though, admitted that the Communist Party of India received financial assistance from its Soviet counterpart.
"It's rubbish! Indira Gandhi or her Congress Party never took KGB money," Soviet Union's Ambassador in New Delhi from 1977 to 1983 Yuri Vorontsov said reacting to the allegations levelled in The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: The KGB and the World on the spy agencies' global operations.
Also see: B Raman on the Mitrokhin Archive controversy
"Gandhi and the Congress as the ruling party could have raised any amount of money through Indian business houses and were not in the need of foreign funds. Yes, I know that the Communist Party received funds from the CPSU (Soviet Communist party) like any Communist Party of the world. It was never a secret for anyone.
"They were transferred through non-diplomatic channels, so I am not aware of any transactions," Vorontsov said.
Vorontsov did not rule out the possibility of KGB operatives in New Delhi concocting reports of their exploits to win favours from their superiors in Moscow.
The Mitrokhin papers issue has snowballed into a major political controversy in India with the opposition BJP demanding that the government come out with a white paper on the sources of funding of political parties from abroad and set up an inquiry by a Supreme Court judge into the allegation contained in the records of the KGB official.
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