The story goes that 69-year-old Chhagan Bhujbal, ensnared in nearly a dozen cases of corruption and misappropriation of funds, called his political boss, Sharad Pawar, on Monday morning with a request. Please organise a press conference to declare your support to me if things don’t go my way, he is believed to have told the president of the Nationalist Congress Party. As the day wound down, turning Mumbai’s skyline into a graph of flickering lights, the net closed around Bhujbal. He was arrested, finally.

Pawar had the party spokespersons address the media as news of the arrest was confirmed. He spoke the right words on Tuesday. “I am confident that we will fight this legally and we are hopeful that an appropriate decision will be there,” Pawar said after questions swirled for a day if he had thrown Bhujbal to the wolves, so to speak, to protect his family and politically important men. The reference was to his nephew and former Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and state NCP chief Sunil Tatkare who are under the scanner for their alleged role in the multi-crore irrigation scam.

Pawar would not confirm the story of the phone call. And Bhujbal carried it with him into the two-day custody of the Enforcement Directorate, which accuses him of costing the Maharashtra exchequer at least Rs 870 crore during his 10-year term as the state’s public works department minister. The Anti-Corruption Bureau, which was forced to investigate cases of corruption against him on the orders of the Bombay High Court, pegged this loss at nearly Rs 2,500 crore. Others believe it could be higher.

The mesh of money laundering

The investigation, which began in 2014, picked up pace last year under the Devendra Fadnavis government, when the Anti-Corruption Bureau raided the Bhujbals’ homes and businesses.

There were nearly a dozen cases against Bhujbal besides his son Sameer and nephew Pankaj, both of whom managed his business interests. But the focus was mainly on two contracts that Bhujbal gave in violation of law and tender rules: one for constructing the Maharashtra Sadan in New Delhi and another for the Mumbai University library in Kalina.

Then there were cases alleging that the family’s firms Parvesh Construction and Armstrong Energy were used to route kickbacks in most of the contracts that the PWD minister handed out, how the shares of these companies were over-priced and sold, how the family’s education establishment Mumbai Education Trust and its staffers were used in the money laundering enterprise whose footprint extended all the way to Kolkata.

In the Maharashtra Sadan case alone, a contract that Bhujbal’s ministry awarded to Chamankar Enterprises, a firm belonging to an aide, the minister is alleged to have netted a cool Rs 13.5 crore at least. Then there are the alleged money transfers made to the Bhujbals, their trusts or the firms they had fronted. The “donors” include three well-known realty firms, infrastructure companies and individuals. The investigating agencies have as many as 60 witnesses who are believed to have given them “tons of data” on the Bhujbals’ empire.

Pankaj was arrested last month. Sameer was questioned earlier this month and let off, but his passport was withheld. Bhujbal was finally taken into custody on Monday night. They face charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act, Prevention of Money Laundering Act, and the Indian Penal Code for cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy. At least three of the family’s nine properties are now attached.

As Bhujbal is confronted with more evidence, both of money laundering and owning assets disproportionate to his income, it seems he will spend a considerable time in the Enforcement Directorate net and possibly behind bars.

In the dock

Life under such scrutiny will be a far cry for the Other Backward Class (Mali community) leader who began his life vending vegetables in Mumbai nearly 50 years ago. His politics attracted him to the Shiv Sena, a party which he considered his extended family for years and to which he brought his raw muscle power and street thuggery tactics from his base in Mazgaon, south Mumbai. In the 1990s, disheartened by the fact that his caste would never get him the top jobs, he switched loyalties to the Congress with a number of Shiv Sainiks, faced Bal Thackeray’s wrath and an attempt to murder by the latter’s enraged followers.

When Sharad Pawar quit the Congress over Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin issue in 1998, Bhujbal was among the first to follow him out. He believed that the Congress in Maharashtra would never extend the cover he needed from the Sena. In the Nationalist Congress Party, he remained forever the outsider-insider. He had all the attributes that Sharad Pawar wanted for a new party, mostly the ability to raise resources through means fair or otherwise, but in a party of pedigreed Maratha men with rural fiefs, Bhujbal was the odd man out given his caste, propensity for theatrics and street-level politics.

His attempt to build an independent platform to espouse the cause of the backwards, invoking reformists Shahu Maharaj and Dr BR Ambedkar, did not quite take off. Over the years though, he built his fiefdom in Yeola, near Nashik, to an extent that the city came to be politically identified with his projects.

“I totally transformed Nashik in 10 years,” he told me while campaigning for the elections in 2014. He lost the Lok Sabha election but won the state assembly seat. Large projects, liberal use of clout, indiscreet show of wealth, all had come to mark the man. His “Bhujbal Palace” in Nashik sprawled 46,000 square feet, complete with sparkling fountains and imported fittings.

The trial

Clearly, Bhujbal is now in the dock. So are Pankaj and Sameer, the two pillars of the family’s business empire. The net is closing in so tightly that Bhujbal – or his family – is not likely to emerge from this unscathed. Many of his political colleagues see this as just desserts for a man who conducted his life and politics with supreme arrogance, sometimes bordering on disdain for others.

Irrespective of the legal cases, Bhujbal’s political career is likely to be at a standstill. The taint will follow him and mar his prospects of the dream job he aspired for – chief minister of Maharashtra – even if NCP were to be in a position of power in the future.

Those who pursued the cases against him are relieved. One of them is Bharatiya Janata Party’s Mumbai MP Kirit Somaiya who threatens that Bhujbal is not the only one, soon Ajit Pawar and Sunil Tatkare will be behind bars too. Somaiya’s dogged pursuit of the Bhujbals and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s quiet impetus to the cases attracted the charge of “political vendetta”.

The credit for unearthing Bhujbal’s many sins of omission and commission and keeping the heat on him must also go to social activist and then Aam Aadmi Party office-bearer Anjali Damania. She took the issue to the Bombay High Court to have the FIR registered when he was still a powerful cabinet minister. Her work against Bhujbal and in the irrigation scam helped the BJP, then in the opposition, to mount the charge of large-scale corruption against the Congress-NCP government.

Fadnavis was in the forefront of the political campaign on the irrigation scam and Bhujbal’s misdeeds. His election campaign promise included stern action against corruption. But the wheels within wheels between the BJP and the NCP, between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sharad Pawar who alternately appear to be friends and foes, mean that stringent action in the irrigation scam can go only this far and no further.

For the party's sake

Sharad Pawar, who celebrated his 75th birthday three months back, is fiercely protective of his family and personal turf. In his long career, he has been accused of corruption many times but the trail never led to his door. Ajit Pawar has been less discreet. If he is arrested in the irrigation scam, it threatens the Pawar family’s edifice itself. This is the something Sharad Pawar is keen to avoid at any cost.

But Fadnavis must show action to keep his word on fighting corruption. Having the net close in on Bhujbal suits everybody just now. This does not mean that Bhujbal is an innocent fall guy – far from it. But there is no doubt that he is the convenient person to catch at this time.

Behind the formal support, hardly any leader of worth in the NCP wants to be associated with Bhujbal today. He sits in ED custody a lonely man, without political godfathers and friends, and with lavish homes and crores of money that he cannot possibly reach. It does not matter now that he was twice the mayor of Mumbai, Shiv Sena’s first legislator, the leader of opposition in the Assembly, two-time deputy chief minister, home minister and the PWD minister.

Once before in his political career, he came close to facing the long arm of law but managed to escape. In the multi-crore Telgi fake stamp paper scam, he was questioned but let off. At that time, he had remarked to me: “Whatever I may have done, even if I’ve done wrong, it wasn’t only for myself. The party too benefited but no one acknowledges that now.” He may have similar sentiments this time too.

Bhujbal is in the dock but Fadnavis is on trial. Can he extend the long arm of law to Ajit Pawar and Tatkare too, against whom allegations of corruption are more serious?