New Delhi, July 30: Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was determined to fix some of his cabinet colleagues and key Opposition leaders, including L.K. Advani, in the Jain hawala case.

And the "ticking bomb", says Margaret Alva in her memoirs released last week, "landed on my lap".

That was nearly 21 years ago when Alva was minister in charge of the CBI.

It was October 1995, and elections were round the corner, when Rao ordered the hawala probe. The list of accused included Advani, Madhavrao Scindia, Kamal Nath, Arjun Singh, N.D. Tiwari, Buta Singh, Bhajan Lal, V.C. Shukla and Sharad Yadav.

While each accused got acquitted, Advani did not contest the 1996 elections and perhaps missed the chance of becoming Prime Minister when A.B. Vajpayee was chosen to head the BJP government.

In the memoirs, Courage and Commitment, Alva has narrated an absorbing tale of her 40-year career under four Prime Ministers - Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Rao and Manmohan Singh.

The list that shook the establishment came towards the end of Rao's tenure. It contained 115 names, including politicians and officials.

The case had surfaced in February 1991 when two Kashmiri students were arrested on the suspicion of acting as conduits for passing hawala money to terrorists. The investigations pointed to the Jain brothers - industrialists B.R., N.K. and S.K. Jain. What emerged was a scam of unimaginable proportions.

It emerged that between 1989 and 1991, the Jain brothers had illegally transferred funds amounting to $33 million from all parts of the world to a range of Indian leaders across parties in return for favours. Even more damaging was the fact that the Jains, protected by powerful political entities, had channelled hawala money to Kashmiri militants.

Alva was the minister of state looking after the department of personnel, which supervises the CBI. "Suddenly, a ticking bomb landed on my lap. The CBI was under my charge. The then Director of the CBI, K. Vijaya Rama Rao, called on me one evening to inform me that the Home Minister, on instructions from the PMO, had directed him to submit the names under investigation to the Supreme Court - this was in response to a notice from the court."

Alva says she turned speechless. "Many of those under the scanner were my colleagues. I asked Rama Rao to wait and went to meet the Prime Minister to ask, 'How can we do this to your Ministers? They are a part of your team. Call them, explain the circumstances, and let them resign, if they so wish, or sack them. But what we are doing is wrong, sir. Please think of the fallout,'" Alva recalls telling Rao.

"Are you convinced they are all innocent?" Rao, Alva says, asked her after a pause.

"How can I say, sir?" she responded.

"Then keep quiet and do not interfere!" Rao told her.

In that case, Alva says, she told Rao she would keep quiet in Parliament too. "I cannot defend this," she said.

"Don't worry, I will defend my decision," Rao shot back "as I left", Alva writes.

Alva had a difficult time telling her party colleagues and politicians that she had little to do with the probe. "The CBI began investigating together with the Enforcement Directorate. I was caught in the crossfire. I got nasty phone calls from MPs and party leaders. No one would believe me when I said I had no role to play in this," she says.

Alva says she had no answers. "All I knew was that decisions were being taken at the 'highest level'."

As the drama unfolded, the cabinet and the party were vertically divided, Alva says. To justify his position before the party, the Prime Minister, she writes, claimed: "This is a question of national security; the same source is funding Ministers, politicians, bureaucrats and terrorist outfits. Can I ignore the issue?"

Alva says it was obvious that everyone saw the probe as a ploy to fix or finish political opponents and critics. "Many of those charge-sheeted were denied tickets in the 1996 elections. The Hawala case dragged on - despite a change of governments. On 8 April 1997, the Delhi High Court Judge, Mohammad Shamim, acquitted L.K. Advani and V.C. Shukla, saying that there was no clinching evidence - only coded entries in private dairies that proved no trail of payments. After this, there was one common intent and resolve across all parties - to bury the Jain Hawala case."

In her memoirs, Alva has taken several digs at Congress president Sonia Gandhi. She has accused Sonia of running the party "arbitrarily" and claimed she was often told by Manmohan Singh that he wanted her (Alva) in his cabinet, but Sonia vetoed it.

Alva mention an incident when the Rao government appealed against Delhi High Court's decision to quash complaints in the Bofors case and quotes Sonia as saying, "What does the Prime Minister want to do? Send me to jail?"

Alva then quotes Sonia as saying, "What has the Congress government (Rao regime) done for me? This house (10 Janpath) was allotted to me by the Chandra Shekhar government."

Without naming the Gandhis, Alva claims her family's name and reputation was seen as a challenge. "Once I had made the mistake of saying: 'The Alvas are the only political family to have a member in Parliament without a break for almost half a century.'"

This statement, Alva writes, sealed her fate. "It was seen as a challenge. And so, after sixty years, we prepared to move out of the capital (Delhi)."