Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has been made to stoop. But has he conquered? This is the question impartial observers in the Congress were asking themselves as Mukherjee read out his “statement” in the 2G spectrum issue: that it was officers who believed, not he, that if then finance Minister P Chidambaram had acted, the telecom scam might have been averted. It was officers who said so in the note that was sent to the Prime Minister’s Office at the insistence of officers in the Prime Minister’s Office (emphasis added).