Manmohan favoured Batla...

“Over the next two days, the three of us were able to persuade the prime minister to overrule the Delhi Police’s reservations about the low morale of the force and it was agreed in principle that a judicial inquiry would be instituted,” writes Khurshid.

Sibal checked with some judges and settled on Bharucha who “graciously agreed to give precedence to the inquiry over other engagements”. The draft terms of reference were drawn up by Sibal and sent to Khurshid by text message from Japan where he had gone for a brief visit. In the mean time, then lieutenant governor Tejinder Khanna wanted to meet Khurshid.

“When I met him, once again, the moral argument was stressed repeatedly. Since I was not then in the government, all I could say was that we wait for Kapil Sibal to return and brief him more thoroughly. That did happen and changed the situation,” writes Khurshid. Ultimately, however, Dikshit’s views prevailed and the inquiry was not instituted.

Khurshid writes he and Digvijaya showed close-up photographs of two boys shot by the police to Congress president Sonia Gandhi ,“which caused her distress and she requested us not to show them to her again.”

He also writes about a “vile and venomous anonymous” letter that reached ministers during the UPA government’s negotiations with activists on the lokpal bill in 2011. When the letter was shown to India Against Corruption members, Arvind Kejriwal said they had nothing to do with it, “as though they were in the know already”. “The letter addressed to me had wild allegations of sexual exploitation of women with a copy of a similar letter having been delivered against receipt to the PMO!... Pranab Mukherjee prevailed upon me to ignore the matter and so the world was deprived of some very salacious fiction about many of us and of an insight into the minds that were leading India’s new ‘freedom movement’ in the capital,” writes Khurshid.