India’s Enforcement Agencies Blackmailing S.C. Judges With Secret Dossier, Threatening to Jail Their Children: Prashant Bhushan in the U.S.
‘Minority and Independent Judges Not Appointed. Judges Are Fearful.’
Fords, New Jersey (June 5, 2025) — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is running a clandestine campaign of surveillance and coercion targeting India’s top judges at the Supreme Court in order to blackmail them, globally renowned Indian civil rights attorney Prashant Bhushan said during a public meeting on his U.S. tour.
Delivering the Keynote Address titled “The State of Democracy in India” at an event hosted by the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) in New Jersey, a U.S.-based nonprofit, Bhushan said:
“The most sinister manner of suborning the independence of the judiciary which this government has devised is to create dossiers. They ask all the agencies – the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Income Tax Department, the National Investigation Agency, and local police – to create dossiers against every important judge, every judge who is likely to become Chief Justice. And if they find anything … they use that to blackmail those judges.”
He added that judges were told, “If you do not toe our line on this issue [then] we will have to expose you or put your children in jail.”
Bhushan, who has spent over four decades holding governments and courts accountable, stated: “This is not a rumor. This is happening.”
He warned that this covert strategy was deliberately dismantling India’s judicial independence, using fear, inducements, and obstruction to bend the courts. He accused the Supreme Court of failing to defend its own authority, even as the Modi government routinely violates legal norms around judicial appointments.
“Unfortunately, the Supreme Court and its judges just do not have the guts to haul them up for contempt,” he said. As a result the government was able to “stifle the selection of some independent judges” chosen by the Court’s own collegium.
Bhushan alleged that “especially judges belonging to the minority communities” were being passed over, even when the collegium reiterated their names.
He compared the judiciary’s current state to its capitulation during the 1975–77 Emergency, when the Supreme Court infamously held that the right to life could be suspended. Modi’s “strong fascist government,” Bhushan said, had made many honest judges fearful. “There is a fear” so pervasive that judges were unwilling to challenge the government, even when constitutional rights were openly violated.
State Capture
Beyond the judiciary, Bhushan described a dangerous consolidation of authoritarian power in India as democratic institutions—from constitutional watchdogs to the media—had been systematically undermined and stripped of independence.
“By and large, in the last 10 years… the Election Commission has ceased to be an independent body. It is seen as a yes-man body which just toes the line of the government,” he said. He accused the government of manipulating the appointment process to ensure loyalty, pointing to how the Chief Justice of India was removed from the selection committee for election commissioners.
Bhushan said the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had “stopped auditing the accounts of governments run by the ruling party. Those audits have come down to less than one-fourth of what they used to be.” On investigative agencies, he stated that the ED, CBI, IT, NIA, and police have all “become largely tools of this government.”
He cited an Indian Express investigation to say “more than 90% of the cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act… were against opposition politicians,” and added that “if they joined the BJP… the cases against them were immediately dropped.”
Bhushan described the mainstream media as being overwhelmingly compromised: “Most of the mainstream media has become lapdog media.”
Electoral Corruption
Bhushan argued that India’s electoral system had been overtaken by corporate money and quid pro quo arrangements between business interests and political parties, particularly under the now-defunct electoral bonds scheme.
“It became clear that the BJP had received more than half of all the electoral bonds that had been purchased. So out of the ₹16,000 crores worth of electoral bonds which had been purchased, the BJP alone had got more than ₹8,000 crores.”
He said investigative journalists had uncovered cases where companies donated electoral bonds and then received government contracts in return.
“This company which gave this electoral bond to this party received this contract from the government being run by that party… or this kind of favor was received by this company from the government which was being run by the party to whom they had given those electoral bonds.”
He criticized the broader electoral system as one in which money determines both visibility and electability: “Our whole system of representative democracy or elections have largely become a game of money. And if you look at the amount of money today… this whole system of democracy in this country has become a game of from money to power and then using that power to make more money.”
Needed: A Truth Army
Calling for civic resistance to the ruling party’s propaganda machinery, Bhushan urged civil society to create a counterforce: “A truth army… a volunteer army of people which spread the truth instead of falsehoods, which spread love instead of hate.” Such a network would operate like the BJP’s IT cell but would be committed to “doing the opposite of what they are doing.”
Media Contact:
Safa Ahmed
media.info@iamc.com
