Looking for clues, instead a circus

KOCHI: Around 200 kilometres of hot pursuit, the object of the chase a white Xylo (KL-01 BP 420) that conceivably had char sau bees written all over it and people lining up beside the highway as though it were a presidential cavalcade and not a police team ferrying a common criminal enjoying his 30 minutes of enduring fame.
This is the CD, cut from dash cam footage, which Kerala would want to watch again and again as evidence of its apparently insatiable appetite for scandal and not the one on rumoured peccadillos of ministers that Biju Radhakrishnan said he had safely deposited in an undisclosed place a 10-hr round trip from Kochi and which occasioned all the high-speed drama that followed.
The point here is not what the Solar Scam commission ordered on Thursday but the manner in which it was done. The commission's intent to prevent the reputation of elected representatives from being unfairly tarnished by a convicted person is incontestable. But shouldn't the commission, in its urgency to obtain the CD as evidence, have been aware that a media circus like the one we witnessed the whole day would only complicate evidence gathering if not actually preclude it?
In the event, after all those speeding cars and panning cameras it was still not clear if the police did manage to obtain what they had set out for. Instead, after the first flush of excitement, what the whole endeavour did manage to leave behind in every conscientious viewer was a sense of orchestrated drama. To whose benefit remains to be seen.