The Bharatiya Janata Party seems to have mislaid its political sense. The four leaders of the party, L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Nitin Gadkari and Arun Jaitley, who were invited to lunch by the prime minister, decided to snub him in order to show “solidarity” with Gujarat’s minister of state for home, Amit Shah. The Central Bureau of Investigation has charged Mr Shah with murder and criminal conspiracy in the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. The BJP accused the Congress of deliberately using the CBI in order to destabilize Gujarat. The allegation was not entirely unreasonable; political parties in power do have the habit of using investigative agencies to further their own agendas — often extremely narrow, affecting nothing but the power tussle within their own parties. Only this time, it was the Supreme Court that directed the CBI to investigate, not the Centre. The court was reportedly irritated with the slow progress of the state’s investigation even after, embarrassingly enough, the state government had admitted that Sohrabbuddin and his wife had been “wrongly killed”.

The BJP’s knee-jerk show of solidarity with Mr Shah was no doubt prompted by the leaders’ anxiety to please Narendra Modi, under whom Mr Shah has flourished. Logic would have showed them that the CBI, taking over the inquiry at the Supreme Court’s direction, would not have reached so high without some significant evidence. The credibility of encounter deaths has long been under scrutiny, and the state government itself admitted to a “wrong” in this case. Mr Shah’s alleged connection to it is yet to be proved, but the barrage of accusations against the Congress immediately after the CBI’s extremely serious chargesheet against Mr Shah can only look like a desperate attempt at distraction. Mr Shah did resign, and gave himself up to the CBI after vanishing for a few days — neither of which fact added shine to the BJP’s virtuous outrage. It seems to be realizing, a little too late, that the other Opposition parties will not be sharing the floor with it against the Congress on this count. Instead, the Congress can now accuse it of supporting a criminal who was a minister in its most prized state. Crime in high places is hardly novel. But the incident has exposed the BJP’s state of disarray. With only Mr Modi to show off, it has completely surrendered whatever it had of political wisdom.