The agency that raids everyone and convicts almost no one
A law-enforcement body is judged by its convictions. By that test, the numbers raise hard questions.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) enforces the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), a law with harsh bail conditions. Yet of roughly 5,297 PMLA cases registered between 2014 and 2024, only about 40 ended in conviction — a rate under 5%, the government itself told Parliament.
The process, critics note, can be the punishment: PMLA makes bail hard, so an accused can spend long periods in custody even when a conviction never comes.
Who gets investigated
ED cases against politicians jumped roughly four-fold after 2014, and by multiple analyses about 95% of the politicians investigated belonged to opposition parties. In its first five recent years the ED filed 911 cases, versus 102 across the previous government’s ten years.
In August 2024 the Supreme Court itself questioned the "quality of prosecution and quality of evidence" in ED cases, and 14 opposition parties petitioned the court alleging misuse.
What rule of law requires
Fighting money laundering is essential — no one disputes that. The test of fairness is whether the law is applied on evidence and even-handedly across the political spectrum, and whether cases end in verdicts rather than open-ended detention. A near-zero conviction rate alongside a lopsided target list is what fuels the "agency as weapon" critique.
Sources · Free to verify
This is a sourced explainer built on public data — not original reporting. Every figure traces to a source above.