Politically motivated or not, the ex-FM must cooperate. Otherwise the Congress can go down a slippery slope

In the end, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the former Home and Finance Minister of India and one who artfully played power games to his benefit so long, should have surrendered with grace to the investigative agencies on the INX media case. For politics is never about right or wrong but smart positioning in a set context. He could have made a virtue of the rather incriminating accusations against him by wilfully surrendering under the law, flagged his honour, howsoever fake, instead of hiding out for hours after a lookout notice was issued against him. Which is why his drive to the AICC headquarters, claiming he was being framed, that the investigative agencies had not filed a chargesheet and that he was the victim of a political witch-hunt, didn’t wash with anybody. The drama was not quite stage-managed to suit the image he had carefully cultivated over the years. Earlier in the day, every senior advocate in Delhi was either trying to figure out the whereabouts of or appearing for or against him in the Supreme Court. For a man regularly used to being feted in the media, a source of salacious gossip, himself a senior advocate and one of the cogs of the Lutyens’ Delhi machine, he simply winced at a moment of crisis. His role in several scams and scandals has long been suspected and many of them reported diligently in this newspaper for years. His intervention in deals, the extent of its propriety and the legality or illegality of his actions, however is something for the courts to decide. That said, his battery of lawyers — all of whom are his senior colleagues in the Congress — has always managed to ensure that Chidambaram remained on bail for years, free from prosecution. This frustrated the attempts of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to question him and his son, Karti Chidambaram, who, too, is accused in several cases alongside him. But this sudden rash of actions against Chidambaram now, as the carefully cultivated Congress ecosystem collapses in the capital after a successive election loss, seems to have caught him and his friends off guard, thus making the man nothing more than a common fugitive who feared arrest.

Chidambaram’s refusal to surrender on very tenuous grounds actually strengthens the case against him. The man, who accused the Narendra Modi Government of letting economic offenders like Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi escape, has been doing the same thing. While the Congress has closed ranks and accused the Government of vindictiveness, this argument has been shot down by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court as well. And herein lies the rub for the Congress — Chidambaram, while a colossus in his own constituency of Sivaganga in Tamil Nadu, now held by his son, has never been a popular leader. While he was feted by a pliant media, particularly the business Press while he was the Finance Minister, rumours of his escapades, some of which would make Mallya blush, have been damaging to him in the long-run. By not surrendering, Chidambaram looked no better than any other on the wanted list. And if the Congress encourages this, the entire party could be badly damaged at a time where it is extremely weak and ruin any argument against the horrendous handling of the current economic situation by the government. Cases against Chidambaram are not all watertight. He can still be acquitted. It is also true that political winds could one day blow in his favour again. However, for any potential recovery, he had to craft his response to look like a victim yesterday. In fact, if he wants to play up the “political vendetta” theory, he should posit himself as the recipient of a hitback. During Chidambaram’s tenure as the Home Minister in 2010, the CBI had arrested Amit Shah in a fake encounter case. When he applied for bail, the CBI opposed the move in the Gujarat High Court arguing that Shah might use his political influence to tamper with the evidence or threaten witnesses. Today, Shah is the Home Minister. Clearly, there is a full circle of an eye-for-an-eye by either side. While we do not see Chidambaram jumping off a dam like Harrison Ford did trying to escape from the law in order to clear his name, the current prognosis is grim.