CBI and ED: Understanding the Debate Over Their Use

Few institutional debates in Indian politics generate as much sustained controversy as the question of whether central investigative agencies, specifically the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate, are being used disproportionately against opposition politicians. This article presents the data and arguments on both sides.

The Central Statistical Claim

The most frequently cited statistic in this debate came directly from opposition parties themselves in a Supreme Court filing: according to LiveLaw’s October 2023 coverage, opposition parties told the Court that 95 percent of political leaders investigated by the CBI and Enforcement Directorate belonged to opposition parties, a figure separately cited by AAP and NCP leader Supriya Sule, according to Business Standard and Deccan Herald’s coverage. The Association for Democratic Reforms separately found a 95 percent jump specifically in opposition leaders facing CBI cases during the current NDA government’s tenure, according to the organisation’s own published analysis.

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The Government’s Counter-Framing

Prime Minister Modi has offered a different framing of the underlying numbers, pointing out, according to Tribune India’s coverage, that only a small handful, by his account just three, politicians faced Enforcement Directorate action before 2014, a considerably smaller number than the volume of cases pursued since, a comparison the government has used to argue the increase reflects agencies now actively investigating corruption cases they had previously left largely untouched, rather than evidence the agencies are being selectively deployed against political opponents specifically.

The Kejriwal and Soren Cases

Two individual cases have become particularly prominent examples in this debate. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in March 2024 in connection with the Delhi liquor policy case, and was later also arrested by the CBI in the same matter, before the Supreme Court eventually granted him bail, with the bench notably split over the underlying legality of his original arrest, according to the Supreme Court Observer’s coverage of the proceedings. Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren was separately arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in January 2024 in connection with a land-related case, and received bail months later citing the same legal reasoning established in Kejriwal’s case, according to coverage by ETV Bharat and LiveLaw, subsequently returning to his position as Chief Minister. Fourteen opposition parties jointly approached the Supreme Court in 2023 alleging what they characterised as arbitrary use of both agencies, according to Deccan Herald’s coverage of that joint petition.

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The Conviction Rate Question

A separate but closely related data point concerns what happens to these cases once they actually reach trial. Deccan Herald’s reporting found only 2 convictions out of 193 politicians who faced Enforcement Directorate cases between 2015-16 and 2024-25, a strikingly low conviction rate relative to the volume of cases pursued. The Supreme Court itself has repeatedly raised concerns about this pattern; Justice Ujjal Bhuyan stated in 2025, according to LiveLaw’s coverage, that “till conviction rate improves, people will remain sceptical about ED arrests,” with other benches separately questioning, according to coverage by Bar and Bench and Business Standard, the underlying “quality of prosecution” in these cases.

The Enforcement Directorate’s Own Counter-Metric

The Enforcement Directorate has pushed back against conviction-rate framing specifically, with an ED-aligned analysis claiming a 94 percent “success rate” when combining asset attachments alongside convictions as a single, broader success measure, according to figures compiled by legal analysis site KNAllp, a framing critics argue conflates two genuinely different outcomes, freezing or seizing assets during an investigation versus securing an actual criminal conviction after a full trial, in a way that makes the agency’s overall track record appear considerably stronger than the raw trial-conviction numbers alone would suggest.

Weighing Both Sides

A fair assessment of this debate has to hold two things simultaneously: the statistical pattern showing a heavy concentration of these agencies’ politically prominent cases against opposition figures is genuinely well documented across multiple independent sources, while the government’s position that corruption enforcement had previously been inadequate also carries some genuine substance, and the low conviction rates cited by critics don’t, on their own, prove any individual case was baseless, since Indian criminal and financial-crime trials often take years to conclude regardless of the underlying merits. What the data does suggest clearly, though, is that the pattern of who gets investigated has been heavily skewed toward opposition figures, a genuinely documented asymmetry that reasonable observers can interpret differently depending on how much weight they place on the government’s stated corruption-enforcement rationale versus the pattern’s political convenience for the ruling party.

Bottom Line

The debate over CBI and Enforcement Directorate use against opposition politicians rests on genuinely documented data on both sides: opposition parties’ own Supreme Court filing citing a 95 percent concentration of agency cases against opposition figures, high-profile arrests of sitting chief ministers Kejriwal and Soren, and a strikingly low conviction rate of just 2 out of 193 politicians facing Enforcement Directorate cases over roughly a decade, weighed against the government’s framing that agencies are simply now pursuing corruption cases more actively than before 2014, leaving the underlying question of intent and fairness a matter reasonable observers continue to interpret differently even as the statistical pattern itself remains well documented.

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Abhyudaya Verma