I am not here to whitewash the Congress party. I am not its spokesperson, defender, or unconditional sympathiser. The Congress has a long record of opaque, faction-ridden internal politics. Many in Punjab – across parties – genuinely believe that money, camps, and “high-command culture” have eroded it from within. They are entitled to that view.
But even a party with questionable practices does not deserve to be attacked with scientifically impossible nonsense.And that is exactly what former Congress MLA Dr Navjot Kaur Sidhu has done with her dramatic assertion that there was a “Rs 500-crore attaché case” for the Chief Minister’s chair – while still claiming to be in the very party she is publicly ridiculing .
A Briefcase That Would Have To Carry 115 Tons
Let us treat her words seriously for a moment and do what politicians often hope citizens won’t do: calculate.
Take Rs 500 crore, all in Rs 500 notes:
Amount: Rs 500,00,00,000
Denomination: Rs 500
Number of notes: 10 crore notes (100,000,000 pieces)
Approximate weight per note: 1.15 grams
Total weight:
100,000,000 × 1.15 g = 115,000,000 grams
= 115,000 kilograms
= 115 metric tons
Now ask yourself one simple question:
Can an attaché case carry 115 tons?
That is the weight of around:
1,533 adults (at 75 kg each), or
115 small cars, or
19 full-grown elephants.
If someone told you they carried 19 elephants in a briefcase, you would either laugh or worry about their sanity. But say “Rs 500 crore” and suddenly some people nod solemnly, as if the laws of physics will politely step aside for political gossip.
They will not.
This Is Not an Attaché Case. It’s a Logistics Operation.
The volume is just as absurd:
Using the RBI’s own dimensions for the Rs 500 note, the total volume of 10 crore such notes is roughly 108–109 cubic metres.
Visualise that:
A cube of notes over 4.7 metres on each side –
roughly the size of a small house.
Stacked vertically, the pile would go up to about 11 kilometres, higher than Mount Everest.
Spread flat, they would cover almost 1 square kilometre of ground.
This is not a “briefcase”.
This is a landmass of money.
To call that an “attaché” is like calling the Arabian Sea a “puddle”.
Even Thousands of Suitcases Don’t Save the Story
Let us be extravagantly charitable and assume Dr Sidhu did not literally mean one attaché – that she meant “suitcases”.
Let’s bring in international airline standards:
Standard Economy checked-in limit: 23 kg per suitcase
Business / some routes: 30–32 kg
Extreme upper limit in some cargo contexts: 70 kg
Now try to fit 115,000 kg of cash into these:
At 23 kg per suitcase: 5,000 suitcases
At 30 kg: 3,833 suitcases
At 32 kg: 3,594 suitcases
Even at 70 kg: 1,643 suitcases
Ask yourself:
Is this a “suitcase offer”? Or a full-fledged cargo operation needing trucks, loaders, godowns and possibly a cargo aircraft?
Even on pure volume, if you tried to pack optimally, you’d still need well over a thousand large trolleys. And if you packed them by volume alone, each would become so heavy that:
the wheels would snap,
the frames would bend,
no human being could move them, and
no airline would touch them.
Yet the public is casually served a story of a “Rs 500-crore attaché” – and we are expected to swallow it without question.
I Am Not Defending Congress. I Am Defending Sanity.
Let me repeat:
I am not defending the Congress. If there is pay-to-play in the CM race; if money bags, deals and “investments” are influencing leadership choices – those allegations deserve to be pursued coldly, clinically and with evidence.
But when a former MLA and doctor, who knows very well what one kilogram is, starts talking in terms that defy physics, somebody has to say: enough.
If there was a real bribe attempt:
Name the person.
State the date.
Indicate where, how, and in what form the money was to be arranged.
File a formal complaint.
Demand an investigation.
That is how serious people deal with serious charges.
What we have instead is an outrageously inflated number, wrapped in a dramatic visual of a briefcase, tossed into the media arena to cause maximum sensation and minimum accountability.
The Cost of Such Nonsense
Some may say, “Chhaddo ji, it’s just a way of speaking. People will understand it’s an exaggeration.”
No. We should stop normalising this.
When public figures start using blatant impossibilities as political rhetoric:
Real corruption gets trivialised.
Real questions about party funding get drowned in drama.
Ordinary citizens become even more cynical, believing everything is a lie, everyone is corrupt, so nothing really matters.
We keep lamenting that politics has lost credibility.
But credibility dies not only through lies – it also dies through careless exaggerations that insult people’s intelligence.
Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely intentional.
Punjab Deserves Truth, Not Fairytales
Punjab is not a stage for personal melodrama.
It is a wounded state trying to rebuild its economic base, social cohesion and political dignity.
It needs:
facts, not fantasies;
evidence, not gimmicks;
and leaders who can look people in the eye and speak the truth, even when that truth is less dramatic than a 500-crore briefcase.
You want to expose corruption in Congress? Please do.
You want to call out the high command? Go ahead.
You want to say tickets and posts are “sold”? Bring proof.
But do not ask Punjabis to believe that 115 metric tons of cash were strolling around in an attaché case.