Two hundred and sixteen corruption enquiries, some pending ten years. Jharkhand High Court puts the Bureau on a clock of its own government's making

Chief Justice M.S. Sonak and Justice Manoj Prasad hold that the right to a speedy trial encompasses a speedy enquiry, and enforce a 2015 notification the State had stopped observing.

A preliminary enquiry by an anti-corruption bureau is the stage before anything formal happens: no FIR, no charge, no trial, and often no knowledge on the part of the officer being looked at. Jharkhand's own 2015 notification says such an enquiry should finish in three months. When the High Court took up the question on its own motion, it found 216 enquiries pending, with delays running between five and ten years, and no justification offered for any of them. A Division Bench led by the Chief Justice has now issued directions putting the Bureau back on the timetable the State itself wrote.

How the Court came to be seized of it

The public interest litigation originates in an order passed in 2019 by a Single Judge of the same Court in an anticipatory bail application. Something in that case led the Court to convert the issue into a proceeding of its own motion against the Chief Secretary, the Home Secretary and the Director General of the Anti-Corruption Bureau. An amicus curiae was appointed, the Advocate General appeared for the State, and several intervenors were represented.

The matter was heard and reserved in September 2026 and decided in October. The judgment is marked A.F.R. — approved for reporting.

What a preliminary enquiry is, and why delay in it matters

The Bench was careful to say it was not adjudicating the individual merits of any of the 216 pending enquiries. What it addressed was the fact of their pendency, and the reasoning is even-handed in a way worth setting out.

Allegations of corruption cannot be allowed to pass without proper investigation, the Court held, because that would embolden corrupt officials. Delay is therefore not a kindness to anyone: an enquiry that never concludes is an allegation that is never tested, and the public interest in curbing corruption is defeated by inaction as surely as by acquittal.

But the Court put the other side of it with equal force. The constitutional mandate of speedy justice must apply both to the public affected by corruption and to the officials suspected of involvement. Where enquiries linger for unreasonably long periods, that mandate is frustrated. The public interest in bringing those involved to book must be balanced with the individual interest in a speedy conclusion of investigations — and the judgment is precise about the alternatives it has in mind: one way or the other.

From that came the proposition the case will be cited for. The constitutional right to a speedy trial inevitably encompasses the right to a speedy enquiry. Where a preliminary enquiry has remained pending for an inordinate period without adequate explanation, the constitutional requirement of fairness is engaged.

That extension matters because the preliminary stage is where the protections of the criminal process do not yet apply. A person under enquiry has no charge to answer, no court to go to, and often no way to make the file move. An officer with a five-year-old enquiry on his name carries a shadow over promotions and postings without ever being accused of anything.

The State's own framework

The Court did not have to invent a standard, and it made a point of not doing so. The notification of 7 August 2015 issued by the State Government itself provides a clear framework: an enquiry is to be completed within three months; extensions lie exclusively with the Bureau Chief, subject to periodic review; and the party concerned must be heard before an enquiry is converted into a criminal case.

On the status of those timelines the judgment is measured. They may not be mandatory — but they are not intended to be breached with impunity unless there are justifiable reasons. Here the delays range between five and ten years, and no justification is even attempted.

That is the finding that permits the directions. A court enforcing an executive instruction the executive has simply stopped following is not substituting its own policy; it is holding the administration to its own rule, and the absence of any attempted explanation removes the usual objection that courts cannot assess operational constraints.

The directions

Consistent with the 2015 notification and the constitutional mandate of speedy justice, the Court disposed of the petition with directions. A preliminary enquiry is ordinarily to be completed within three months, as the notification provides. Where the Bureau Chief grants an extension, the enquiry should preferably be completed within six months of the date it was opened. If it is to run beyond six months, the Bureau Chief must record reasons in writing, specify the further period, and review the extension at short intervals. Those reasons are to be recorded on the enquiry file and are to be available for scrutiny.

The design of that is worth noticing. The Court did not make the three-month period a hard deadline whose breach voids the enquiry — a remedy that would have handed a windfall to the subjects of 216 files. It built an escalating requirement to explain instead: three months as the norm, six as the outer preference, and beyond that a written record, reviewed at short intervals, open to inspection. A file that cannot be closed must at least be accounted for, and the accounting is on paper where someone can read it.

Order

The petition was disposed of in those terms. The Court recorded its appreciation of the assistance rendered by the amicus curiae and by the Advocate General and his team, and concluded with what it called the earnest hope that the compliances will continue and that the pending inquiries will now be taken to their logical conclusion.

That last phrase carries the judgment's balance. The Court is not asking for the enquiries to be closed, or for anyone to be charged; it is asking for them to end in a decision. For the officials whose names have sat in a Bureau file for a decade, and for a public that has been told nothing about 216 corruption allegations in all that time, a conclusion either way is the relief that was missing.