india

Updated: Aug 22, 2019 14:19 IST

On Wednesday night as a retinue of Delhi Police officials stood guard outside former Union minister P. Chidambaram’s residence in New Delhi’s Jor Bagh, gates shut, the house turned into a fortress.

Quietly, two Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) teams jumped past the boundary wall and swiftly made their way inside. Leading the charge and scaling the wall deftly was R. Parthasarathy, the CBI’s investigating officer in the INX Media case, who scaled the walls of Chidambaram’s home and emerged with the senior Congress leader, half an hour later, and drove him away to the agency’s headquarters.

More than two years back, as the CBI filed its First Information Report (FIR) in a case that involved the former senior minister of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and his son, Karti Chidambaram, Parthasarathy set the wheels in motion on the investigation.

A year later, in April 2018, seated next to him was Karti Chidambaram, at New Delhi’s Patiala House Courts Complex. With a watertight case, the CBI special court sent Karti Chidambaram to CBI custody and eventually judicial custody.

The deputy superintendent of police of the CBI, Parthasarathy, continued his pursuit of the father-son duo, who were in the eye of the storm, with the CBI alleging irregularities in the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds of ₹305 crore in 2007, at a time when P. Chidambaram was the finance minister under the UPA-1 government.

Former officials who have served with the agency recall Parthasarathy as a “quiet, determined officer,” and as the man “who can see the INX case through to its logical conclusion.”