बेबाक · Editorial
The widening net: India's enforcement agencies and the test of even-handedness
From a SEBI settlement with Angel One to ED attachments and a temple-donation SIT, the agencies are everywhere; their legitimacy rests on one law for all.
A week of reckonings
In recent reports, India's enforcement architecture announced itself across a wide spectrum of money and power. The Securities and Exchange Board of India accepted ₹4.28 crore from Angel One to settle a case over lapses in authorised person oversight. The Enforcement Directorate attached ₹13.83-crore assets in a Uttarakhand SC/ST scholarship scam case and froze ₹18.44 crore across 129 bank accounts in an online investment-fraud probe. In Ayodhya, an SIT forms part of the investigation into alleged embezzlement of Ram temple donations. In Washington, the US Supreme Court rejected TCS's appeal in a $168-million trade-secrets case. The reach is undeniable; the question is what it is for.
One law, every door
That reach is, in principle, what a constitutional republic should want. The governing promise is that the law applies identically to the powerful and the vulnerable, the regulated broker and the alleged fraudster, the institution and the organisation under foreign-funding scrutiny. A corporate house contesting a verdict abroad, a regulated brokerage settling with SEBI, educational institutions accused of fraudulently obtaining scholarship funds, and a US-based Christian organisation facing an ED case should all meet the same impartial machinery. When enforcement is broad, the citizen's instinct should be approval, not anxiety. The anxiety begins only when breadth looks selective — when the same energy is not visible against every offender, whoever they are, whoever they know.
The case for reach
There is a strong case that India long suffered the opposite malaise: financial crime that went uninvestigated because the perpetrators were powerful or connected. Seen thus, the Enforcement Directorate freezing 129 accounts in an online investment-fraud probe, SEBI extracting a ₹4.28-crore settlement from Angel One, and an SIT examining allegations around Ram temple donations are signs of institutions doing necessary work. Markets need a regulator that scrutinises orders placed through common IP and MAC addresses for multiple clients, as the Angel One case alleged. Investors need money trails traced before funds vanish. Donations given in trust by ordinary devotees deserve scrutiny when whistleblower claims raise an alarm. A state that cannot follow the money cannot protect the weak from the predatory.
The case for restraint
Yet reach without rigour is its own hazard. An attachment or an account freeze can come long before any court convicts; for the ordinary accused, the process itself can become punishment, assets locked and reputations damaged while trials crawl. Coercive process reaches the powerful too: a Member of Parliament from West Bengal was questioned for as long as eleven hours in the primary-school jobs case and, separately, for more than seven hours by the State CID over alleged forgery of legislators' signatures. Whether the accused is a legislator or part of an alleged fraud network, legitimacy rests not on the number of summonses issued but on cases carried to conviction — and on visible even-handedness, lest urgency against some and patience towards others corrode the whole.
The evidence, and the harm
Strip away the noise and the ledger is sobering. In Uttarakhand, the Enforcement Directorate alleges that educational institutions fraudulently obtained scholarship funds released by the State's Social Welfare Department by showing ineligible, non-genuine and non-verifiable students as beneficiaries. In the ₹18.44-crore online investment-fraud probe, 129 bank accounts have been frozen. At Ayodhya, investigators are examining allegations of donation embezzlement. A separate ED case names a US-based Christian organisation and six others over alleged illegal use of foreign funding under laws including the FCRA and FEMA. The real ledger of financial crime is not abstract: it is the scholarship beneficiary, the investor, the trusting devotee.
The standard to hold
The way forward is not less enforcement but better-disciplined enforcement. Agencies should publish, annually and case-wise, how summonses, freezes and attachments translate into chargesheets and convictions, so that activity is measured against outcome. Trials in attachment cases must be time-bound, so pre-conviction seizure does not harden into indefinite punishment. Welfare departments must digitise and independently verify beneficiaries before funds leave the treasury; large charitable and religious bodies handling public donations need credible audits and whistleblower protection. Above all, recovered money must flow back to those defrauded where the law permits — the scholarship beneficiary, the cheated investor — not sit frozen for years. India does not need agencies that are feared; it needs agencies that are trusted, and the difference is even-handedness.
The rule of law is measured not by the drama of the summons but by whether the same yardstick reaches the powerful, the vulnerable, the institution and the fraudster.
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