Bad timing by the Congress..
Let’s look at the exit options the Congress had in the P J Thomas case. True, we have 20:20 hindsight. But reviewing the Congress’s actions via the exit options logic will yield some interesting insights . The really smart exit option came when PJ Thomas’s name was empanelled as a CVC candidate. Both the 18-year-old but still judicially alive palm oil case and Thomas’s bureaucratic ruling that the CAG and CVC cannot question the telecom policy were known facts then. Also known was the fact that A Raja’s telecom policy was becoming a potential political liability. The cacophonous critique of the telecom policy had by then lost the distinction between what was wrong — giving licences to ‘friends’ of Raja and allowing pre-operations profit-making through spectrum sale — and what was and is right — not making spectrum a high-priced resource and making a distinction between policymaking and accounting /vigilance functions. Politics can be like that. And it’s worth taking a risk over someone...