When 83-year-old Sukh Ram, the oldest legislator in the country with a record 12 poll wins in a 45-year-long political career, decided to retire last month, he had hoped it would be with a clean chit from the courts. That was not to be.

“The ruling is only a few months away,” says the man who was both at his zenith and nadir as Union communications minister. He is now loath to dwell on the darkest chapter of his life, one that will find a mention in the biography he plans to script once the poll dust settles down. “Shanta Kumar wrote Adhure Safar Ki Poori Kahani, I will write Poore Safar Ki Adhoori Kahani,” he chuckles.

He has just returned from addressing a rally for his son and political heir Anil Sharma. Going back to the day when his homes were raided in 1996, he says, “By the time I returned from the US, I had been branded the biggest criminal in India.”

Sukh Ram, who had earlier won a libel suit of 50,000 pounds from a British magazine that called him corrupt, had turned into a political pariah overnight when CBI allegedly found sacksful of notes from his home just when he was being toasted as a minister who had unleashed the communications revolution in the country. Thrown out of the Congress and slapped with graft charges, he reinvented himself at the helm of the Himachal Vikas Party, whose five seats helped to enthrone BJP in the hill state in 1998.

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