The Great "Delhi Police & Integrity"

Delhi’s startup and professional community today is living through two equally disturbing truths: founders Vaibhav Chawla who feel forced to shut down functioning businesses once the criminal process is turned against them, and ordinary citizens who watch their life’s savings flow to sophisticated fraudsters while the police machinery moves at a glacial pace, if at all. 

Both experiences point to one central failure—a policing culture that can be hyper‑active where there is pressure and influence, yet strangely comatose when a victim seeks nothing but protection under law.

When process becomes the punishment

In one set of cases, entrepreneurs narrate how a dispute that should have remained commercial is rapidly escalated into a criminal battle, with the system appearing to run on a presumption of guilt and a readiness to use coercive tools at the complainant’s bidding.

The message they receive is brutal: it is not enough to build a healthy business; one must also survive a process that can become a punishment in itself, driven less by evidence and more by pre‑motivated narratives and vested interests.

This weaponisation of criminal law chills enterprise. When founders begin to believe that a single disgruntled party, armed with connections and an FIR, can threaten not just reputation but personal liberty, the space for honest risk‑taking shrinks dramatically.

 The law that should be a neutral referee starts looking like a hired muscle for whoever shouts the loudest.

A victim of cyber fraud, abandoned at home and attacked from outside

At the other end stands a respectable professional doctor in Delhi—an ordinary citizen and taxpayer—who becomes a victim of an elaborate online trading fraud operated through social media groups, legitimate‑looking trading interfaces and coordinated instructions from unknown handlers.

 She invests large sums over a brief period, sees artificial “profits” on screen, and then watches her access blocked, her accounts frozen and her savings effectively vanish.

She does what every citizen is told to do: immediately approaches the specialised cyber police station, gives a detailed account, furnishes ledgers, bank statements and communications, and waits for the system to act.

 Instead, months pass without meaningful relief, to the point where she has to move court just to know what, if anything, has been done in the name of investigation and to secure basic documents connected with the siphoning of her own money.

A glaring contrast the system can no longer deny

The most damning aspect is the contrast. Where the accused side in another jurisdiction mobilises the police and secures swift court orders that effectively strip the victim of whatever funds remain, the very State in which the victim resides appears to move with a deliberate, comfortable slowness.

One arm of the system acts with urgency to give effect to an order favouring alleged fraudsters; the other dozes over a detailed complaint backed by documentary evidence from a law‑abiding citizen.

This is not a stray lapse; it is symptomatic of a policing mindset that responds quicker to influence than to injustice. When economic offences cross State borders and digital platforms, the least that can be expected is coordinated, time‑bound, documented action to trace money, identify real human actors and secure the victim’s rights.

 Instead, what is visible is selective efficiency: full speed when the accused mobilise process, neutral gear when the victim begs for protection.

Delhi cannot afford a sleeping police

To be absolutely clear, the criticism is institutional, not personal. There are honest officers in every force. But an institution that sleeps over a detailed cyber‑crime complaint while citizens are bled dry by organised fraud, and yet appears energetic when it comes to executing orders that benefit the alleged perpetrators, forfeits moral authority to call itself a guardian of law and order.

A police force that is alert to influence but deaf to victims is not merely inefficient; it becomes complicit in the erosion of public faith.

The demand, as a practicing lawyer, is unapologetically loud: investigations into complex financial and cyber offences must be swift, transparent and even‑handed, regardless of who is the complainant and who is the accused.

Status reports must be timely; inter‑State coordination must be real, not rhetorical; banks and intermediaries must be compelled to share essential documents with victims; and above all, the police must remember that its first duty is to citizens whose rights have been violated, not to those who have learned to weaponise the criminal process.