There is no one in the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee or in Shivaganga who are not happy with the Delhi High Court order refusing to entertain the anticipatory bail application filed by former Union Finance and Home Minister P Chidambaram who is always portrayed as the party’s strongman in the State.
“All good things have to come to an end and this is what has happened to Chidambaram and his family,” a senior Congress leader in TNCC told The Pioneer. The former Finance Minister who was the country’s Home Minister for fairly long time is one of the most unpopular politician in Tamil Nadu, said the Congress leader who did not want his name to be quoted for obvious reasons.
“You have been writing about the weakness of the Congress in Tamil Nadu for quite some time. Chidambaram is the root cause of the pathetic situation of the party in Tamil Nadu. He is always known as a weekend politician and has no acceptability among the people of the State,” disclosed the leader.
S Rangaraj, author and proprietor of Rare Books, said Chidambaram could be described as a paper tiger . “It is the media in Tamil Nadu which portrayed him as the State’s strongman. For Chidambaram, what matters is his family and nothing more than that,” said Rangaraj.
The electorate in Shivaganga, the home constituency of Chidambaram , said has alienated the voters because of his arrogance and intimidating nature. “He did not contest the 2014 Lok sabha election fearing defeat. Please remember that he manipulated to get elected to the Upper House from Maharashtra because of his close association with Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi,” said Rangaraj.
Narayanan Thiruppati, the BJP spokesman said the solidarity shown by some of the senior Congress leaders in New Delhi was just a façade. “In the heart of their hearts, all of them are happy because it is an open secret that Chidambaram’s antecedents are not above the board. He camouflages his crimes with the help of that idiomatic English with which he hopes to hoodwink the public,” said Narayanan.
Chidambaram’s woes are far from over. He has to appear before the Madras High Court on August 30 to face the cross examination in an election petition filed against him by the AIADMK candidate immediately after 2009 LS election.
The charge by the AIADMK candidate was that |Chidambaram won the 2009 election from Shivaganga by manipulating the entries with the help of data entry operators. The former minister had succeeded in delaying the trail process for more than three years citing procedural issues.
When the former chief minister Jayalalithaa was sentenced and convicted by the Special Court in |Bangalore in 2014 in the Disproportionate Asset Case , Tamil Nadu had witnessed mass protests by volunteers of the AIADMK and many people committed suicide. “Nothing of that sort will happen in the case of Chidambaram because people do not consider him as an approachable leader. Chidambaram himself knows that he has no support among the voters,” said Narayanan.