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The Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case on Friday, without granting him any interim relief, put to rest all the strategies being worked upon.
The political drama over former finance minister P Chidambaram didn’t go along expected lines for the legal advisors who were formulating a strategy for him.
The Supreme Court of India’s decision to take up the case on Friday without granting him any interim relief, put to rest all the strategies being worked upon.
With this Chidambaram had lost out on the issue of time and been pushed to the wall.
To answer the question as to where Chidambaram had been for 26 hours, from the time the Delhi high court on Tuesday refused to grant him anticipatory bail in the case relating to alleged financial irregularities in the INX Media’s Rs 305 crore FDI deal, he was at his close friend’s house and not, as suspected, with a Congress politician.
The case against him had been monitored by Arun Jaitley in 2018 when he was finance minister.
In the given situation Chidambaram turned to the only avenue available to him: the Congress party which he has served for long.
Once he received the legal setback at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, he reached 24 Akbar Road, the party’s national headquarters in Delhi, so they too could share the burden of political fallout, if any, from the serious case of corruption.
When Chidambaram’s statement was being prepared many Congressmen wanted him to taunt Home Minister Amit Shah over his own troubles with the law earlier, but the former finance minister and once one of the most powerful men in the land studiously avoided any mention of Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The statement was crisp, diplomatic, sophisticated and pretentious -- as always. He was not so nervous as sarcastic, saying, “Until Friday and beyond, let's hope the lamp of liberty will shine bright and illuminate the whole country.”
He told one Congress leader just before the press conference began: “Let’s do it and get it over with. At the most they would torture me after arrest.”
All the while he was smiling and kept his composure.
The Congress leader present at the media briefing said, “When these two men are ruling you can’t expect the rule of law.”