A massive controversy had erupted after former Finance Minister P Chidambaram's image with a Taliban leader surfaced in Dec 2017

Congress' P Chidambaram said that soon after Mumbai attacks, Hafiz Saeed was in a safe house in Karachi and now roams freely with blessings from the ISI. He also said that India is incapable of targeting him

New Delhi: Hours after Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said that India had the ability to carry out an Osama-like operation to eliminate those responsible for the Mumbai attack, Congress leader P Chidambaram said that India never had the capability to target Hafiz Saeed.

The veteran Congress leader said that soon after the Mumbai attacks, Hafiz Saeed was in a safe house in Karachi and now roams around freely but we don't have the capability of targeting him in a raid like the one the Americans undertook to get Osama in his Pakistani (Abbottabad) hideout.

“We didn't have the capability then (in 2008) and I'll be pleasantly surprised if we have it now. If we had tried, we would've failed and that would have been a bigger blow,” he said.

Chidambaram further added that India had strongly conveyed to Pakistan through diplomatic channels that any Mumbai-like repetition would invite retaliation.

In an interview with Times Now's Editor-in-Chief Rahul Shivshankar, General Rawat had said that replicating the US style attack on Abbottabad was an option but added that there are other ways of doing it.

"We are doing it differently. One option is that you do what the Americans did to Osama Bin Laden. That is an option... It is possible. But the government is doing it in a different way. Pakistan is being isolated. Today, you see where Pakistan is... There has to be some action shown by the other side to say that we have taken some action," he said.