Is Rahul throwing his weight behind Chidambaram going to be palatable to the other partners?

As the 2019 Lok Sabha elections lead up to a climax, New Delhi is busy reading the tea leaves and guessing who will form the government in 2019. If sources are to be believed, the former Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram (PC) hopes to convince Rahul Gandhi (assuming the Indian National Congress becomes the single largest party and the UPA gets over 180 seats) that he and he alone is capable of sending Narendra Modi and Amit Shah into political oblivion. You can make your own assumptions on how he will achieve this – after all, it is now proved that both Hindu Terror and Ishrat Jehan fake encounter were hatched by some febrile and fertile minds in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and some new concoction of part fact and part fiction can be hatched up to hurt the duo.

But there is a problem – PC is charge sheeted

Having achieved the dubious feat of achieving a Silver Jubilee of anticipatory bails, Chidambaram may not be accepted by the coalition partners / Congress. This does pose a formidable problem – the way he intends to work this out is to impress perhaps the highest court that all the cases that have been foisted on him are false and that he is as pure as Ganga Jal. According to sources within the party, Chidambaram has assured the high command that a higher court will stay all these pending investigations.

But would the country’s highest court allow itself to be convinced by the arguments of arguably one of the most corrupt politicians to have ever graced the political scene in India? And why should Rahul Gandhi give up his right to the premiership? Is it because the Damocles’ sword of multiple citizenships may be hanging over his head as well as the National Herald scam? Not to mention the inconvenient fact that he was born Italian and therefore the rules that disqualified Sonia Gandhi would apply to him too (despite some protesting that the Constitution has been changed to fix this post-2004)?

What are the trends suggesting?

The more one hears, the more it is getting confusing. Many voters have become wise and are just not telling who they voted for. The usual block voting phenomenon may or may not work – the long voting schedule has created new narratives which might cause some impact on the undecided. In short, the situation is as clear as mud. Assuming the stars do lineup Congress’s way, who else would they need to form the government? Is Rahul throwing his weight behind PC going to be palatable to the other partners? Weight and watch!