IK rules are not preserved when you convert your character to Panda. Instead, it just bakes out the animation frame-by-frame exactly as it plays back in Maya.
If you do get a handle to the node and move it around in Panda, it won’t have any affect on other nodes.
That being said, if the node is a control of some kind, then it would have been converted as a joint if it was converted at all. Check to see if the node appears in the egg file. If it is a joint in the egg file, it will be a joint in your Actor (which is different from a node, and you would find it via actor.listJoints()). If it is a regular node in the egg file, it would have been optimized out by the egg loader. You can get it back if you need it via egg-optchar, but remember it won’t have any controls associated with it.
David