Discuss the tension between federal investigative agencies and state governments in India, using a recent Supreme Court case as illustration.

Section 6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946 makes the CBI's entry into a State conditional on that State's consent [1], while the ED under the PMLA, 2002 needs none [2]. This asymmetry sits at the heart of a recurring Centre–State friction that is increasingly being mediated by the judiciary.

The recent illustration

• In the Salboni land-grab case (West Bengal), a Supreme Court Bench led by CJI Surya Kant hearing the plea of Sumit Roy, personal assistant to TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee, orally faulted probe agencies for "dragging their feet" against powerful persons while acting swiftly against ordinary accused [3].
• The ED sought custodial interrogation citing ~₹30 crore routed to a firm linked to the MP; the Court instead stayed the arrest with conditional cooperation, and the Calcutta High Court had voiced "despair" at the probe's intensity [3].
• The case captures both faces of the tension: agencies accused of political targeting, yet also of under-investigating the influential.

Roots of the friction

• Constitutional: "Police" and "public order" are State subjects (List II), but central agencies operate through Union laws — a structural overlap the Punchhi Commission (Volume V, 2010) examined while urging cooperative mechanisms in criminal justice [4].
• Legal: West Bengal withdrew general consent to the CBI in 2018 and sued the Union; in State of West Bengal v. Union of India (2024) the Court held the suit maintainable, allowing federal grievance to be tested judicially [5].
• Institutional: Vijay Madanlal Choudhary (2022) upheld the ED's wide arrest, search and attachment powers [6], even as over 5,000 PMLA investigations since 2014 have yielded few convictions [7] — fuelling charges of process-as-punishment.

Federalism is not weakened by strong central agencies, but by agencies perceived as partisan. Statutory fixed tenure with collegium-based appointments, time-bound probes, and a consultative Centre–State protocol as the Punchhi Commission envisaged can restore trust — making equality before law under Article 14 real for the powerful and the powerless alike.