DM Monitoring
Mumbai: Last week, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Opposition (LoP), took to social media platform X to express his apprehension about a possible raid at his residence by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the country’s premier investigating agency. Gandhi, attributing the information to his “sources,” claimed that the government did not like his speech during the recent Budget discussion and hence planned the raid.
Although Gandhi’s residence has not yet been raided, such an act is not implausible. In recent years, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, the ED, which is mandated to investigate money laundering and foreign exchange violations, has carried out a record number of raids on Opposition voices, even sending a few, including two state chief ministers, behind bars. The Opposition has consistently accused the agency of being weaponised against them, and Indian courts too have steadily pointed to the extent of the ED’s misuse.
Here is the list of a few recent court orders and observations criticising the ED for failing to act independently.
The courts have from time to time also rebuked the agency for violating the rights of accused persons in their custody.
Earlier this year, the central agency invoked a stringent provision of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) to record the statement of a doctor whom one of the accused in a PMLA case had consulted. In April, when the hearing of the accused Amit Katyal’s interim bail application came up before a special court in Delhi, Special Judge Vishal Gogne of the Rouse Avenue Courts came down heavily on the agency. Katyal, an accused in the land-for-jobs case, is allegedly a close associate of former Bihar deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav and was arrested in November last year.
In the same case, in June, the court directed the joint director ED to appear with relevant case records and apprise the court of the status of the investigation. The court also criticised the ED for seeking more time to file the supplementary chargesheet.
While the Delhi court was miffed by the agency’s overreach and invasion of an individual’s privacy, the Bombay high court too pulled up the agency in another case for not taking enough steps in a long-pending investigation.
After a local police investigation into an alleged cheating case involving Rs 175 crore, the ED had taken over the investigation against Tops Group, a company providing security guards. The ED charged the company under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act following allegations by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) that the company had duped the government agency of over Rs 175 crores. However, the ED later began dragging its feet.
One of the obvious connections to make here is the prime accused and businessman Rahul Nanda’s close association with Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) MLA Pratap Sarnaik. Nanda and his daughter Rasshi Nanda have been absconding since the case was registered in 2020. At that time, the residence of Sarnaik, who was still with the undivided Sena under Uddhav Thackeray’s leadership, was raided by the agency. Sarnaik switched allegiances, and since then, he has been untouched by the ED.
