3. Nagarwala scandal (1971):In 1971, a telephone call came to the head cashier of SBI, parliament street, instructing him on behalf of the then PM Indira Gandhi to hand over Rs. 60 lakhs to a man in connection with Bangladesh crisis.
Later it was discovered that former army captain, Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala, then attached to Indian intelligence or RAW, collected the money from Malhotra, the chief cashier of SBI, by "mimicking the voice of Mrs. Indira Gandhi", presumably for being diverted to the Mukti Bahini in its guerrilla-liberation campaign from West Pakistan.
Nagarwalla was arrested immediately. Malhotra went in person to collect a receipt from P. N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi's personal secretary, informing him that the requested payment was done.
A stunned Haksar informed Malhotra that Mrs Gandhi had instructed nothing of the sort and urged him to inform the police immediately. The opposition parties suspected that the money belonged to Indira Gandhi and that it was happening on a regular basis.
The matter became more controversial after the investigating officer, D. K. Kashyap, was killed in a car accident. Nagarwala was sentenced for four years and died in prison in February, 1973.
