बेबाक · Editorial
Between the FIR and the verdict: India's uneven reckoning with wrongdoing
From a ₹1,816.22-crore EPFO loss allegation to a 20-year POCSO sentence, the machinery of accountability is moving — slowly, unevenly, but moving.
A week of reckonings
Read together, a scatter of unrelated bulletins tells one story about the Indian state's capacity to hold wrongdoing to account. The Central Bureau of Investigation has booked Reliance Capital and its former chairman Anil Ambani over an alleged ₹1,816.22 crore loss to the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation from investments in non-convertible debentures. Odisha's Economic Offences Wing has made another arrest in a crypto-ponzi scam involving over ₹200 crore. Kothagudem police arrested the prime accused in an alleged ₹52 crore investment fraud and seized 35 vehicles. A new Special Investigation Team, formed on the Supreme Court's direction, has issued notices including to Champat Rai and trustees in the Ram temple offerings-theft case. Different states, different crimes — one question: does the law arrive?
The core tension
The tension is between announcement and completion. India's investigative agencies are fluent in the opening act — the FIR, the arrest, the seizure, the notice. The Antilia bomb-scare case shows what the closing acts demand: a special NIA court has framed murder and UAPA charges against ten accused, including former police officers Sachin Vaze and Pradeep Sharma, under the IPC, UAPA and the Explosive Substances Act, in connection with the Mumbai Antilia bomb scare and Mansukh Hiren murder case. In Shivamogga, an accused was arrested about thirty-seven years after a robbery. Justice that takes nearly four decades to reach a suspect, or years to reach a charge, tests the citizen's faith that filing a complaint changes anything. The gap between registering a case and finishing it is where public trust leaks away.
Steel-manning both sides
Two honest readings collide. The optimist points to real capacity: forensic experts and senior chartered accountants being included in the Ram temple SIT; economic-offence investigators tracing assets and seizing vehicles; a POCSO court in Kendujhar, under Additional District Judge Monalisa Mohanty, sentencing a coaching-centre teacher or owner to twenty years' rigorous imprisonment for raping or sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl student — proportionate, unambiguous, and legally consequential. Due process demands its own caution: an FIR is not guilt, and Anil Ambani has denied wrongdoing and reserved legal remedies, while the NIA accused have pleaded not guilty. Rule of law, not rule by accusation, is the standard. Both truths describe the same system from opposite ends.
What the evidence shows
The pack rewards neither despair nor triumphalism. On one side sit genuine convictions: a Kendujhar POCSO court recorded a twenty-year rigorous-imprisonment term for the sexual assault of a child, the machinery working as designed. On the other sit cases still at the accusation or investigation stage — the ₹1,816.22 crore EPFO FIR the accused denies, a ₹200 crore crypto-ponzi under EOW investigation, a ₹52 crore alleged fraud that yielded 35 seized vehicles. And in Thiruvananthapuram, it is learnt that the government asked cashew nut scam accused K A Ratheesh to resign as Khadi Board secretary after the High Court criticised his continuance in the post. When court criticism is needed before a tainted official is reportedly moved out of office, the ordinary reflexes of institutional hygiene look weak.
The verdict
The concern is not that Indians commit crimes — every society does — but that the distance between wrong and consequence remains punishingly long and unevenly walked. A child's abuser can receive a 20-year sentence; a corporate loss allegation involving a workers' provident fund may still be only at the FIR stage; and a robbery suspect can be arrested about thirty-seven years after the offence. This asymmetry is not neutral. It risks teaching citizens that time, resources and procedural drag matter as much as evidence. Equal law demands equal seriousness. A ₹1,816.22-crore case deserves disciplined pursuit, a ₹52 crore case deserves the same, and the accused everywhere deserve a fair, prompt trial.
The way forward
The fix is procedural, not rhetorical. Fund the economic-offence wings and forensic-audit capacity that the Ram temple SIT is assembling, and staff them before scandals break, not after. Set and publish timelines from FIR to charge to verdict, and pair speed with full rights for the accused. Make continuance in sensitive public office after serious criminal accusation subject to clear service rules, so no High Court need shame a Khadi Board secretary into resigning. And measure agencies not by arrests announced but by convictions secured and public money recovered where wrongdoing is proved. A republic earns trust when the ledger it opens is one it is seen to close.
A republic is judged not by how loudly it announces an FIR, but by how patiently it carries a case to conviction.
Your Constitutional Rights
What the Constitution guarantees in this storyThe State shall take steps to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services.
Directive PrincipleThe right to move the Supreme Court directly to enforce fundamental rights — called by Dr Ambedkar "the heart and soul of the Constitution." The courts can issue writs such as habeas corpus and mandamus.
Fundamental RightNo person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except by a fair, just and reasonable procedure established by law — read by the courts to include dignity, privacy, health, a clean environment and livelihood.
Fundamental RightThe State shall not deny any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws. Like must be treated alike; the law cannot be arbitrary.
Fundamental RightWhat this editorial rests on
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