The Great Heist

Some 25 counting machines whirred breathlessly as they went through bundle after bundle of cash.

- Amitabh Srivastava

A few gave up and broke down, but around 10 more were on standby for precisely such contingencies. By the end of that exercise on December 10, the machines, after hours of work, had already counted notes worth hundreds of crores of rupees. The exact figure is yet to come in, but many peg it at much over Rs 300 crore. If the Congress was looking to recover some moral salve from its electoral debris in three big heartland states in the week gone by, having the liquor company run by the family of one of its parliamentarians plastered all over town as the protagonist in a jaw-dropping case of tax evasion was hardly it. Not just an ordinary one either. The seizure associated with its three-time Rajya Sabha MP from Jharkhand, Dhiraj Sahu, is reputedly set to go down in the record books as the highest-ever haul of unaccounted-for cash in a single operation by the income tax department.