ED’s decade haul - 2 convictions in 193 cases

The Enforcement Directorate’s scorecard landed with a thud in Rajya Sabha on 18 March 2025—193 politicians probed over ten years, and just two convictions to show for it. Union minister of state for finance Pankaj Chaudhary laid it bare in a written reply to CPM MP A.A. Rahim, his pen scratching out a tale of relentless pursuit but scant results. “One in 2016-17, another in 2019-20,” he noted, the numbers stark against a backdrop of 32 cases in 2022-23 alone—the peak of a decade that saw 59 filings between 2022 and 2024, Modi’s second term roaring toward the Lok Sabha polls.

I can feel the heat off those stats—Trinamool’s Partha Chatterjee still tangled in court, Jyotipriya Mullick and Anubrata Mondal out on bail, Abhishek Banerjee grilled over coal scams while Suvendu Adhikari, now BJP’s Bengal spearhead, walks free after switching sides. Chaudhary’s reply dodged Rahim’s ask on Opposition targeting—“no data kept,” he shrugged—yet the opposition’s chorus rings loud: ED’s a BJP washing machine, scrubbing clean defectors like Maharashtra’s Ajit Pawar and Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma, while AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal rots in jail over liquor raps. The Indian Express tallied 25 such turncoats since 2014, cases fading like smoke.

Chaudhary stood firm—“ED acts on evidence, not politics,” he wrote, nodding to judicial oversight from PMLA courts to the Supreme Court, which last November jabbed at the agency’s limp conviction rate during Chatterjee’s bail plea. I see a Ranchi judge in 2017 sentencing Jharkhand’s Hari Narayan Rai to seven years, then Anosh Ekka in 2020—two lonely wins amid a sea of 193. A Kolkata tea-stall owner might mutter over his radio, tallying arrests against outcomes, while the agency’s grind churns on—credible or not, it’s a long shadow cast over India’s political turf.