India’s longest-serving prime minister can certainly outperform Jawaharlal Nehru in one respect: using investigative agencies to suppress Opposition leaders and engineer riots against minority communities. Unfortunately for him, the courts are now dismissing such false cases one after another.Modi’s twelve years as prime minister have left behind a graveyard of false litigations and collapsed court cases. Consider the 2002 Delhi violence, in which over 50 people, mostly Muslims, were massacred. The riots were carefully orchestrated to establish a Gujarat-model permanent vote bank for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It went on for weeks.Police filed over 758 cases, mostly against the minorities and opposition-party workers, at the instance of the political bosses. Litigation carried on for years in different courts. Now before the judiciary, those same police cases are collapsing. While acquitting the accused, the courts noted large scale “fabrication” of evidence by police. Some judges have even proposed taking action against the officials responsible for this.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThe courts have reportedly acquitted the accused/victims in 80% of the 126 cases in which verdicts have been pronounced. In many cases, courts noted that the charges brought by police were similar – like “carbon copies” of each other. The courts have evidently not found substance in the police claim that violence was “pre-planned” as a part of a larger conspiracy to “threaten India’s unity”. The police failure to bring forth credible facts has been noted more than once.Attacks on free pressA similar route has been taken in Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s witch hunt of free media. The case of NewsClick would put to shame even hardened spin dictators like Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The police raided the journalists of the news portal and interrogated many of them for days. Many were terrorised and forced to quit.NewsClick itself was forced to drastically reduce the scale of its operations. Now the court had found that all the charges related to money laundering and economic offences were just a cock-and-bull story. Obviously, the enforcement agencies were under pressure to resort to outright witch-hunting. The court noted that the stories told about it were a “fabricated, highly exaggerated and completely unbelievable tale”.Judicial strictures highlighting the misuse of power to penalise opponents is certainly a much-needed relief. But is it enough? What is the guarantee that the unscrupulous rulers or their cohorts or another set of officials will not indulge in similar abuse of power in the future? The present rulers’ disdain for rule of law is legion.This also raises another egalitarian humanist issue. What about the mental agony and years spent in jails by the hundreds of victims of political persecution? Who will be held responsible for inflicting mental agony on the innocent political activists? At present, there is no law to punish perpetrators of such crimes who inflict pain on innocents, even if the cases they brought collapse in courts. And thus the unscrupulous executive gets away with such actions.NewsClick owner and editor Prabir Purkayastha. Photo: YouTube screengrabA media house has now proposed making provisions in law to tackle this lacuna. “It is time to take this conversation forward and evolve a framework to ensure accountability without hampering investigation,” the Indian Express said in an editorial. Will the proposal be music to the ears of our authoritarian rulers? Is such an initiative ever possible under the present rulers?The onslaught by enforcement and investigative agencies on BJP’s political rivals has proved disastrous for the latter. After twelve years of Modi’s “transformative leadership”, political witch hunting has been put on mission mode. Hence, courts are refusing to buy the curious claims made by agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).Many cases, little to showThere were only two convictions in the over 193 cases the Enforcement Directorate registered during the last ten years, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary informed Rajya Sabha last year. Of the total cases, 138 – or 71% – were registered in just the past five years, after the BJP returned to power in 2019.Both convictions in the Enforcement Directorate’s cases were of political leaders from Jharkhand. Former state minister Hari Narayan Rai was sentenced to seven years of rigorous imprisonment and fined Rs 5 lakh under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA) in 2017, while another former minister from the state, Anosh Ekka, was sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and slapped with a fine of Rs 2 crore in 2020.But in total, the Enforcement Directorate had reportedly registered 5,297 money laundering cases across the country over the 2014-2024 period. Trials had been completed in only 43 of these cases, as per a report. Yet the directorate claimed a 93% success in cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002.However, this has been contested by legal experts. They say that the claim of 93% is statistical jugglery, invented to mislead the public. If nearly 6,000 cases were investigated over the decade and only 15 individuals were ultimately convicted, as reports say, where does the 93% figure emerge from? they ask.Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance Pankaj Chaudhary’s response in Rajya Sabha on February 3, 2026 to a question about cases registered by the Enforement Directorate. Source: Parliament of India web siteActually, the Enforcement Directorate is calculating success not on the total cases filed but decided cases, which props up the performance even without being able to secure actual convictions.Apparently, the agency is under intense pressure from the political bosses to show results. For starters, it was forced to file cases against political targets as part of a subterfuge. This was to force them to defect to the ruling party as part of ‘operation lotus’. Ostensibly, the Enforcement Directorate officials later found it was practically impossible to prove the accusations in courts.“You cannot act like a crook,” Supreme Court bench headed by chief justice Surya Kant warned Enforcement Directorate. “Out of 5,000 cases, only ten convictions,” the bench wondered.The agency should at least care for its own credibility, the court said. Unfortunately, officials are less worried about that than pleasing their political bosses.CBI, the other agency, is no better. Last year, the Central Vigilance Commission revealed that over 7,000 corruption cases brought by the CBI were awaiting trial. Over 2,250 cases had been pending trial for ten years and more than 379 for more than twenty years. Of the total cases, 1,506 were reportedly pending for less than three years, 791 for more than three years and up to five years and 2,115 for more than five years and up to ten years, as on December 31, 2024.Parliament was told that the conviction rate of cases registered by the CBI over the last five years has dropped to 67.56% in 2021 as compared to 69.83% in 2020. However, cases against members of legislative assemblies and members of Parliament stood at 56 between 2017 to 2022.“Your conviction rate is very low,” Chief Justice of India Surya Kant told the advocate representing CBI. “This encourages criminals.” He was then granting bail to the last accused in the so-called excise scam filed against several Aam Aadmi Party leaders (and others), and was primarily used by Shah to sharpen his attacks against the party then ruling Delhi.The court released Bharat Rashtriya Samiti leader K. Kavitha, who was the last accused in the case. AAP leaders Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia were among the accused.The CJI told the CBI, “In the past 21 years, I have never seen a case with less than a hundred witnesses. In some cases, 200 witnesses, 300 witnesses… Passing on the road, these people were all witnesses. This is what they do.”Toolkit of bureaucratsThe capture of returning officers is the latest in Shah’s toolkit. The BJP bagged a Rajya Sabha seat in Madhya Pradesh by getting a favourable ruling from the returning officer who rejected the Congress party’s Meenakshi Natarajan’s nomination papers. The rejection was based on the claim that she withheld a ‘criminal’ case against herself in a Telangana court.As per Congress Member of Parliament Abhishek Singhvi, there was no case in any court against Natarajan. A private person had filed a complaint against her but no case was registered. Yet the returning officer summarily rejected Natarajan’s papers.On the other hand, in a similar case, a Jharkhand returning officer gave additional time to BJP nominee Parimal Nathwani to establish his claims.No doubt the two returning officers have taken contradictory positions, both in favour of the ruling party. Will the returning officers, as in the case of Enforcement Directorate officials in West Bengal, be rewarded for the favours?The question is relevant in view of a similar deal, at a higher level, in West Bengal. Manoj Aggarwal, West Bengal chief election officer has been made the state chief secretary. Subrata Gupta, former Election Commission official in charge of the SIR process in West Bengal, was also accommodated. Going by another report, the Returning Officer of Bhabanipur, Surajit Ray, where former chief minister Mamata Banerjee lost her recent election, has also been posted as a senior secretary in chief minister’s office as pointsman-cum-adviser.Tailpiece Sadbuddhi Yagna: Congress workers in Bikaner sat around a sacred fire and prayed to the fire god to give sadbuddhi (good sense) to prime minister Narendra Modi and his followers. They offered oblations to the god in Arya Samajist style.In an age of fractured mandates, personality cults and transactional alliances, P. Raman brings clarity to India’s shifting political equations. With Realpolitik, the veteran journalist peers beneath the slogans and spin to reveal the power plays, spectacle, crises and insecurities driving India’s politics.