A woman gets bail because the police, arresting her for her husband’s murder, never told her why she was being arrested. A former chief minister walks free because a charge-sheet dissolves into inference stacked on inference. A clinic in Hisar gets acquitted 19 years after a raid because the complaint against it bore one signature where the statute demanded three. Three courts, decades apart, arrive at the same finding: The police investigative process is broken.

The Code of Criminal Procedure of 1861, and its 1898 successor, were built by a colonial administration that wanted order rather than rights. Independence changed the purpose of the policework. Articles 21 and 22 arrived as a new demand laid over an old machine: The State could still arrest, but now it had to explain itself, and on time. The Supreme Court gradually made that constitutional promise concrete through decisions such as Joginder Kumar and DK Basu, holding that arrests must be justified, documented, timed and communicated to the family.

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However, things are still dismal. As per the National Crime Records Bureau, the charge-sheet rate for IPC offences in 2023 was 72.7%: The police file cases........

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