When Enforcement Becomes the Punishment: India's Accountability Deficit

On 19 May 2026, India's Enforcement Directorate received judicial authorization to arrest Ashok Kharat in connection with an alleged Rs 70 crore extortion scheme targeting victims through what sources describe as a coordinated fraudulent operation. The same day, a department head at Lucknow University addressed the fallout from a case involving obscene calls made to university staff — remarks that themselves betrayed the casualization of harassment as institutional inconvenience. And in Ahmedabad, the municipal corporation suspended four engineers over irregularities in a Rs 7 crore storm water drainage project, a project whose failure to deliver functional infrastructure raises obvious questions about where the money went and who was watching.

Three stories, three enforcement actions, one pattern worth naming.

India's accountability architecture has expanded considerably over the past decade. The Enforcement Directorate, originally constituted to investigate exchange control violations under FEMA, has accumulated a portfolio that now encompasses money laundering probes, cooperative bank fraud, and a growing docket of high-profile financial crime cases. The ED's own disclosures show thousands of properties attached in ongoing investigations. The Prevention of Money Laundering Act, amended in recent years to expand investigative scope, has given the agency tools that civil liberties advocates argue are disproportionately wielded relative to judicial safeguards. That tension — between aggressive enforcement and procedural rigour — is not unique to India. But the question it generates here is sharper: when enforcement becomes the primary instrument of accountability, what happens to prevention?

The Architecture of After-the-Fact

The Lucknow University case is instructive precisely because it is small. The obscene calls case reportedly involved communications directed at university staff; the department head's response, as reported by The Indian Express, included phrasing that media commentators were quick to flag as reflecting institutional tolerance for behaviour that should never have required a response to begin with. The university did not have systems that caught the harassment early. It had a situation that became public, and then it had reactions.

This is the logic of reactive accountability. Harassment occurs. It is reported or discovered. The institution responds. The response — a departmental head making remarks to the press — is itself evidence of how normalized the behaviour had become; the framing of surprise ("if we knew earlier...") suggests a culture where reporting mechanisms were either absent or ineffective. The victim did not get early intervention. The institution got a news story.

The Ahmedabad storm water drainage project follows the same script at a different scale. Four engineers suspended over a Rs 7 crore project that apparently contained irregularities — meaning the work delivered did not match the specifications or the money expended. The suspension is the action. But the Rs 7 crore was already spent. The infrastructure gap that the project was meant to address already exists. Suspension is a response to discovery, not a prevention of harm.

The Extortion Case and the Limits of Prosecution

The Kharat case is the most financially significant, and its contours are worth noting. A Rs 70 crore alleged extortion scheme — the ED has reportedly built a case that victims were targeted systematically, with the agency's findings now sufficient to support an arrest authorization. That the agency has reached this threshold suggests investigative diligence. What it does not tell us is what the victims experienced during the period before enforcement intervened.

Financial crime works differently from institutional harassment. Extortion victims often do not report early — fear of retaliation, economic dependency, uncertainty about legal recourse all suppress reporting. The ED's own case data suggests that enforcement actions frequently follow extended periods of victimization. The harm is real and documented; the enforcement response is structurally delayed.

This is not an argument against enforcement. It is an observation about what enforcement alone cannot do. Prosecution that follows harm does not undo harm. It may deter future actors, and evidence on that question is genuinely mixed — studies of general deterrence in financial crime suggest that certainty of detection matters more than severity of punishment, and certainty in India's enforcement environment is uneven.

The Structural Question

What these three cases share is a common institutional posture: the system was not designed to prevent the harm it is now reacting to. The Lucknow University harassment was not prevented by reporting channels that worked. The Ahmedabad drainage project was not audited before completion. The extortion scheme was not detected until victims — presumably after considerable suffering — came forward.

India's governance architecture has invested in enforcement capacity. The CBI, the ED, the Lokpal, state-level anti-corruption bureaus, and a proliferation of specialized courts all represent institutional commitments to accountability. What has received less systematic attention is the architecture of prevention: early warning systems, mandatory disclosure regimes, whistleblower protections, audit functions with genuine independence and resource, and — at the most basic level — institutional cultures that do not treat harassment as a matter for bemused comment.

The enforcement-focused model also carries a distributional problem. Aggressive enforcement tends to concentrate on cases that are large, politically visible, or technically complex. The Rs 7 crore drainage project gets suspended engineers. The Rs 70 crore extortion scheme gets ED attention. But the smaller corruptions — the petty demands, the informal extractions, the low-level graft that constitutes the daily friction of governance for ordinary citizens — operates below enforcement thresholds and above the cost of reporting. This is the corruption that erodes institutional legitimacy most steadily, and it is the corruption least amenable to the prosecutorial response.

What Would Prevention Look Like

A genuinely preventive accountability architecture would require upstream interventions that India has not systematically built. Mandatory pre-registration of financial schemes with regulator disclosure, rather than post-hoc enforcement. University harassment reporting systems with third-party intake rather than internal resolution. Infrastructure auditing at project milestones, not after completion and apparent failure. Whistleblower protection with genuine teeth — financial rewards, legal shields, and institutional firewalls against retaliation.

Some of these mechanisms exist in pockets. The Companies Act requires audit committees. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act mandates internal complaints committees. Whistleblower protections exist under the Companies Act and, for securities markets, under SEBI regulations. The problem is patchy implementation, inconsistent penalties for non-compliance, and institutional cultures that discourage reporting.

The enforcement actions of 19 May 2026 are, individually, evidence of functioning processes. The ED followed procedure. The Lucknow University department head spoke publicly. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation suspended engineers. Each action responds to a problem. None of them prevents the next one.

India needs an accountability architecture that is harder to circumvent and cheaper to access. What it has built, largely, is a system that catches certain kinds of harm after the damage is done — and that is better than nothing, but it is not sufficient. The victims of these three cases got, at best, late justice. The question the institutions should now be asking is why they are still in a position to report that harm at all.