The Delhi High Court’s decision today, 19 December, to set aside the Lokpal’s sanction in Mahua Moitra’s cash-for-query matter is being read as a clean institutional rebuke: a watchdog chastised, a politician reprieved, and a prosecution slowed down. That reading is not wrong—but it is incomplete.
What the High Court has done (and, just as importantly, what it has not done) throws a sharper light on a quiet fault-line in India’s post-2018 anti-corruption architecture. We now operate two parallel routes for pursuing alleged corruption by the political class, and the more “independent” route—the Lokpal route—may be skirting the single most consequential procedural gate, rather safeguard, Parliament added to the Prevention of Corruption Act in 2018.
That gate is Section 17A. And in this litigation, it is the provision that did not feature—at least not yet.
What the High Court has actually decided
On 19 December 2025, a Division Bench of Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar set aside the Lokpal’s order granting the CBI sanction to proceed against Mahua Moitra and directed the Lokpal to reconsider the issue within a month. While pronouncing the decision, the Bench was reported to have said: “We are of the view that Lokpal erred in deciding the issue.” A detailed judgment was expected to be uploaded later.
That procedural posture matters. This is not a finding that the allegations are false. It is not even a finding that the investigation is bad on merits. It is, at least at this stage, a finding that the Lokpal’s decision-making at the sanction point did not meet the standards the statute demands—particularly the discipline of taking the public servant’s response seriously when the statute says it must be obtained and assessed.
In other words, Ms Moitra has not yet won the case conclusively. She has won the right to have the gatekeeper behave like a gatekeeper.
The Lokpal’s sanction power—and why process matters here
The Lokpal Act is unusual because it does not merely receive complaints and recommend action. It can, after an investigation report is submitted, decide whether the state proceeds to prosecution at all. Section 20(7) contemplates a bench of at least three Lokpal members considering the investigation report and, after obtaining the comments of both the public servant and the “competent authority”, choosing among three broad outcomes: sanction for a charge-sheet, closure, or departmental action.
Then comes the special muscle of Section 23: the Lokpal’s sanction displaces the ordinary sanction regime under the Prevention of Corruption Act and the familiar protections of Section 197 of the CrPC (and the now-defunct Section 6A of the DSPE Act). This design was deliberate—an anti-corruption ombudsman that does not have to queue up at the executive’s door for permission to prosecute senior public functionaries.
That is precisely why procedural fidelity at the Lokpal level is not a nicety. When one body is allowed to replace the usual sanctioning authority, the legitimacy of the replacement depends on the robustness of its reasons and the transparency of its choices. If the Lokpal is to act as a substitute for political sanction, it must show that it is not merely endorsing the investigating agency’s narrative by default.
The High Court’s intervention, read in that light, is less a favour to Moitra than a reminder to the Lokpal: if you have been given an exceptional statutory role, you must meet exceptional standards of application of mind.
December 17, 2025, screenshot.
The missing question: Section 17A and the legality of beginning the probe
All of that still leaves the real systemic puzzle untouched.
Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act is not a sanction-to-prosecute provision. It is a prior-approval provision that bites at the very start. It says that no police officer shall conduct any enquiry, inquiry, or investigation into an alleged corruption offence where the allegation relates to any recommendation made or decision taken by a public servant in the discharge of official functions, without previous approval from the appropriate authority.
In plain terms: even before the machinery begins to turn—before the first structured enquiry, before a formal investigation is set in motion—there is meant to be a screening filter, recorded and attributable.
That is exactly the kind of question a cash-for-query case invites, because the “official act” dimension is central to the allegation. The charge is not merely that gifts were received; it is that parliamentary tools—questions, access, and official use of a member portal—were allegedly deployed as part of a quid pro quo.
And yet, in the reported rounds before the High Court that culminated in the Lokpal sanction being set aside, the argument that should have electrified the room—“Was prior approval under Section 17A obtained before any enquiry or investigation began?”—has not been the headline issue.
That silence may be strategic. Or it may reflect how unsettled the Lokpal–section 17A relationship still is.
Does the Lokpal route sit outside Section 17A?
This is the hard structural problem: the Lokpal Act was built to reduce executive gatekeeping; Section 17A was built to restore a form of executive gatekeeping at the entry point of corruption investigations.
There is no neat textual “answer key” because the two statutes were not fully harmonised after 2018.
The Lokpal Act expressly displaces the normal sanction regime for prosecution by giving the Lokpal the power to grant sanction. But Section 17A deals with something earlier than sanction: the very permissibility of beginning the enquiry/inquiry/investigation process in certain classes of cases.
If Section 17A is treated as a universal condition on police action under the PC Act, then the CBI cannot say: “We were asked by the Lokpal, so we are exempt.” The agency is still a police agency, operating under the PC Act, and Section 17A is written as a command to police officers.
But if Section 17A is allowed to operate fully even when the Lokpal orders investigation, the executive can effectively re-enter the process at the earliest stage, becoming the gatekeeper again—precisely where the Lokpal model sought to remove it.
That tension is not theoretical. It is design-level. And it has consequences.
The Karnataka High Court’s warning—and why it matters beyond Karnataka
One reason Section 17A is hard to ignore is that High Courts have already taken it seriously as a mandatory threshold condition in Lokayukta-linked corruption matters. The Karnataka High Court has held that preliminary inquiry steps undertaken before obtaining Section 17A approval were impermissible—treating the statutory language as meaning what it says, and refusing to bless a “we were only doing a preliminary exercise” justification.
If a Lokayukta-police set-up cannot begin even an initial structured probe without Section 17A approval where the provision applies, it becomes difficult, as a matter of principle, to claim that the Union’s Lokpal-triggered route should be free to do so.
That is why the Moitra litigation feels like it has only completed Act I. The court has reset the Lokpal’s sanction decision. It has not yet tested whether the investigation itself is built on a procedurally valid foundation.
Two pipelines for pursuing political corruption—and where the real power sits
Zoom out and the picture is stark.
Pipeline one is the classic model: complaint to the police agency; potential Section 17A screening at entry; then, after investigation, the normal sanction to prosecute under the PC Act, ordinarily involving an authority embedded in the political state.
Pipeline two is the Lokpal model: complaint to Lokpal; Lokpal-supervised preliminary processes; direction to CBI; then, after investigation, Lokpal itself grants sanction for prosecution under its special power.
The Lokpal pipeline is the one the public instinctively treats as “more independent”, because it does not begin by asking the elected executive for permission. But if Section 17A is held to apply even when the Lokpal directs the CBI to investigate, the executive returns as the entry gatekeeper anyway.
So the real battlefield is not the later sanction point (where Lokpal has explicit statutory primacy). The real battlefield is the beginning—who controls the switch that turns a complaint into a coercive investigation.
Why a robust, pro-17A reading is not anti-Lokpal by definition
It is fashionable to treat Section 17A as a shield for the powerful. Sometimes it will operate that way. But in politically charged cases, a robust Section 17A reading can also be defended as a rule-of-law stabiliser for three reasons.
First, it forces the state to put an accountable decision on record at the moment it chooses to criminalise an “official act”. That matters in cases where the line between political conduct and criminal conduct will be contested for years.
Secondly, it prevents forum-shopping by design. If Section 17A binds police action under the PC Act across the board, then neither the executive nor the complainant can conveniently route a matter through the Lokpal simply to avoid the discipline of prior approval that would otherwise apply.
Thirdly, it can create a “two-key” system rather than a deadlock: an entry filter under Section 17A (judicially reviewable if abused), followed by an exit filter at the prosecution stage by a reason-giving Lokpal bench that is required to engage with defence submissions. Properly administered, that is a more transparent architecture than either pure executive control or a free-floating investigative launch untethered to any recorded threshold decision.
This is not an argument that Section 17A must be used to block action against politicians. It is an argument that, if Parliament has written a procedural gate, courts should resist allowing one route to become a procedural escape hatch.
Why Moitra’s “half-win” may be an intelligent choice
If you assume litigation is strategy, the present outcome looks even more like deliberate sequencing.
By winning on the Lokpal’s failure to properly consider submissions at the Section 20(7) stage, Ms Moitra gets immediate relief without forcing the High Court to decide the more explosive question of whether Lokpal-directed investigations require Section 17A approval. Courts are generally more comfortable enforcing internal statutory discipline (follow your own procedure) than rewriting the boundaries between two statutes with competing institutional logics.
But if the Lokpal, on remand, re-does the process carefully and again grants sanction, the next challenge can shift from “your sanction order is procedurally defective” to “your entire investigative foundation is unlawful because the investigation began without the prior approval Section 17A contemplates”.
That is why this moment feels like only half the story. The judgment has pressed the Lokpal to behave more like a tribunal. It has not yet forced the system to answer who holds the keys to begin the investigation at all.
What happens now—and what to watch
The immediate future is clear enough: the Lokpal must reconsider the sanction question within the time the High Court has set, and it will now have to engage with the submissions it previously invited.
The larger future is unsettled, and the next round—if it comes—may be the one that matters most.
If Section 17A is raised squarely, constitutional courts will have to confront questions that go well beyond one MP: whether Parliament’s 2018 insistence on prior approval applies evenly to all PC Act investigations by police agencies; whether the Lokpal route can legitimately operate as a corridor around that insistence; and whether anti-corruption design should prioritise independence from the executive or uniform procedural safeguards against politically motivated investigations.
Ms Moitra’s present victory buys time and imposes discipline on the Lokpal. But the constitutional-institutional contest—about whether the Lokpal’s route can be used to start PC Act investigations without the prior approval Parliament wrote into Section 17A—has not yet had its day in court.
And when it does, it is difficult to defend any outcome in which Section 17A is treated as mandatory for one route and optional for the other. If the law is to command respect, it must mean the same thing whichever door you walk through.