Home minister Sushilkumar Shinde is again in the eye of storm for his unwarranted comment that he had evidence that BJP and RSS had run Hindu terror camps.

“Reports have come during investigation that BJP and RSS conduct terror training camps to spread terrorism… Bombs were planted in Samjhauta express, Mecca Masjid and also a blast was carried out in Malegaon,” Shinde had said.

The BJP later attacked Shinde and demanded an apology from Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Finding himself at the centre of the controversy, Shinde later told reporters that he had referred to “saffron terrorism,” which was nothing new and appeared in newspapers several times in the past.

Is it yet another quotables quote from Shinde who has been in the eye of storm on several earlier occasions for his unwarranted comments?

It seems Sushilkumar Shinde is the man the home ministry chair had been waiting for for years. Acting in a style more suited to a spy agency chief, Shinde has been in the habit of dropping nuggets of information that only he and he is in the possession of.

On an earlier occasion, he said while speaking in the Interpol conference in Rome that he had credible information of terror groups investing in stock markets. After playing hoopla-cum-I-spy with reporters over which terror groups and which stock markets for days, it came out that Indian intelligence agencies had investigated and ruled out this possibility a couple of years ago. But somehow the idea dead in the investigating agencies’ files kept ticking like a bomb in Shinde’s mind until it chose to explode right in the middle of his speech at the Rome conference of the Interpol.

Then soon after Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab’s hanging at the Yerawada jail of Pune when mediapersons ran helter-skelter begging for a quote as to who all knew about the secret hanging, Shinde appeared on the scene in a deus ex machine. Speaking in a no-nonsense style, Shinde stood larger than life on all TV channels saying that he and only he knew about the plan. “I am a former policeman and this is my style of working,” he is learnt to have said.

‘Sonia Gandhi?’

‘No sir, she didn’t have a whiff of it.’

‘Manmohan Singh?’

‘Nay, not him.’

Shinde agent number 007 was bigger than everybody.

So this time again, at Congress chintan shivir, while Sonia Gandhi herself and other senior leaders refrained from naming BJP, Shinde knew it was his chance. The man who is stuck in politics though he seems to have always wanted to head a spy agency could not have a better place and podium to hog it all and soak in its glory.