There is a moment in the law of evidence where the ordinary rules simply stop applying. A statement made by a person about to die — about the cause of that death, or the circumstances leading to it — is admitted as truth-bearing in a way that almost nothing else a living person says is permitted to be. The hearsay rule bends because the law makes a wager on human nature: a person who knows he is dying has no further use for a lie. Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri — a dying man is not presumed to lie. It is one of the oldest intuitions in criminal jurisprudence, older than the Indian Evidence Act that codified it, older than most of the institutions built to receive it.
Three times in the last decade, that intuition has been tested against the summit of Indian political life rather than its ordinary victims — and each time, the test has gone largely unanswered.
I.
On the night of February 22, 2021, Mohan Delkar, seven-term Member of Parliament from Dadra and Nagar Haveli, was found hanging in a hotel room on Mumbai’s Marine Drive. He had, months earlier, quit the Congress and won his seat as an independent — defeating the BJP’s sitting MP even as the party swept the rest of the country. He left behind a fifteen-page note in Gujarati naming Praful Khoda Patel, the Union Territory’s administrator, and accusing him of sustained harassment.
The detail that should unsettle us most is not the accusation. It is the choice of venue. Delkar did not die in Silvassa, the territory he represented and where the alleged persecution had taken place. He went, deliberately, to Mumbai — because he believed the Maharashtra police, then under Uddhav Thackeray, would investigate his death honestly, and that no police force in his own jurisdiction would. His son would later tell investigators the same thing in different words: had this happened at home, even the note might never have surfaced.
Sit with what that means. A seven-term parliamentarian — not a powerless citizen with no recourse, but a man who had spent decades inside the institutions of the Indian state — concluded that his own jurisdiction’s criminal justice machinery could not be trusted to investigate his own death. He had to export his dying declaration to a jurisdiction he hoped would still function.
What followed was, briefly, procedurally correct: an FIR under Section 306, an SIT. And then politics did what politics does. Delkar’s widow Kalaben won the by-election on Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena ticket in 2021, riding the very sympathy the note had generated. Three years later, she contested — and won — on a BJP ticket. Whether that migration was coerced or chosen is not something the electoral record can settle, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the deeper fact needs no speculation: the political symbol produced by an allegation of BJP persecution was, within three years, absorbed into the BJP’s own electoral architecture. The system did not have to disprove the allegation. It only had to outlast it.
II.
Kalikho Pul’s case is larger in scale and murkier in implication, and it does not fit neatly into the same story. Pul was Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh for five months in 2016, installed with BJP support against the Congress, before the Supreme Court restored the government he had displaced. A month after leaving office, he hanged himself in the chief minister’s residence in Itanagar, leaving behind roughly sixty handwritten pages — ten bundles, later split between his family and the police — alleging that senior Congress politicians and, extraordinarily, sitting and retired Supreme Court judges had demanded money from him.
It is the structural question: a person who had occupied the highest office in his state left behind the most detailed possible account of what he believed had been done to him, addressed to institutions more powerful than any he could have summoned while alive. And those institutions were never compelled to test it.
III.
On August 16, 2026, Ashis Banerjee — five-time TMC MLA and former Deputy Speaker of the West Bengal Assembly, who had just lost his seat to the BJP in that year’s state election, the one that ended TMC’s long rule of Bengal — was found dead at a party office in Rampurhat, with a note denying he had ever taken a bribe and describing his entry into politics as a mistake. Mamata Banerjee has spoken of harassment and mental pressure; the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari has pointed instead to pressure from within Banerjee’s own party. This case is only hours old as I write, and I do not know yet what it will turn out to have meant. But its very freshness is instructive, because we can already watch, in real time, the mechanism that swallowed the other two: an accusation appears, it is immediately claimed by one side and contested by the other, and the underlying question — what actually happened, and can anyone independent find out — is at risk of never being asked by anyone with the power to answer it.
IV.
The temptation, faced with these three cases, is to write the essay I first thought I was writing: a political indictment, a pattern of the powerful using the machinery of the state to hound dissenting politicians toward suicide, with party labels changing to fit whichever government held power over the relevant jurisdiction. That essay would not be wrong, exactly. But it would be smaller than the truth.
The real question sits one level below politics, in the architecture of evidence itself. A dying declaration is not admitted because we must believe it. It is admitted because it deserves to be tested with an urgency nothing else commands — precisely because the person who made it can never again be questioned, contradicted, cross-examined, or asked to clarify. A living complainant can be interrogated. A living accused can defend himself. A living witness can be made to reconcile his story with the facts. The dead cannot do any of this. That is exactly why the burden shifts entirely onto the institutions that receive their testimony. The dying declaration is simultaneously the most privileged form of evidence the law recognizes and the most vulnerable, because its author has permanently forfeited the power to insist on its own hearing.
And what our record shows, across three governments, three states, three political affiliations, is a consistent institutional failure to carry that burden. Not concealment, necessarily — something closer to absorption. The allegation becomes ammunition for one party and an inconvenience for another; it generates FIRs that stall, SITs that produce no findings anyone remembers, judicial proceedings that dissolve into procedural fog; and eventually the political system simply metabolizes it, the way it metabolized Kalaben Delkar’s migration from the party of the accusation’s target to that very party three years later. Nobody had to prove Delkar’s note wrong. The republic just had somewhere else to be.
V.
This is where the argument has to leave politics and enter constitutional theory, because the stakes are larger than any one case. India’s Constitution promises far more than criminal justice — it promises social justice, economic justice, political justice, the whole architecture of the Preamble’s aspirations. Those are extraordinarily difficult achievements, requiring the redistribution of power, wealth, and dignity across a society organized for centuries to resist exactly that redistribution.
But criminal justice is not one of those difficult achievements. It is the floor beneath all of them — the most rudimentary and universal form of justice a state can offer, prior to any theory of equality or fraternity. It is not even cpontestable on any ideological or administrative framework. It asks nothing more than this: when one person claims to have been wronged by another, can the state find out what happened? Every higher promise the Constitution makes presupposes that this most basic machinery works, because a state incapable of investigating an elementary claim of wrongdoing has no plausible claim to redistributing wealth justly, protecting the vulnerable justly, or adjudicating between competing claims to dignity justly. The higher promises are built on the assumption that the state can do the lower thing first.
And here is the inversion that makes Delkar, Pul, and Banerjee worth writing about together despite their differences of party and circumstance. We are accustomed to worrying about criminal justice failing the powerless — the anonymous complainant whose FIR is never registered, the undertrial who waits years for a hearing no one schedules. These three men were not powerless. An MP. A Chief Minister. A Deputy Speaker. If their final testimony — given under the one evidentiary condition the law treats as nearly sacred — cannot compel the state to find out what happened, what confidence can an ordinary citizen have that his complaint, made while very much alive and possessing none of their standing, will fare any better?
A nation is not merely a population inside a border, nor even a population governed by a shared constitutional text. It is held together by a prior and much simpler proposition: that we owe each other justice — that the same state will hear a stranger’s grievance with the same seriousness it would hear mine, regardless of who governs, who is accused, or whose party benefits from the silence. Social justice, economic justice, political justice — all the Constitution’s magnificent higher ambitions — are elaborations on that founding debt. Before we can owe one another equality, or fraternity, or redistribution, we have to owe one another the truth about what happened when someone was wronged.
When the last word of the dead — spoken under the one condition the law was built to honor — cannot compel the living state even to look, that debt has gone unpaid at its most elementary level. And a state that cannot pay its most elementary debts is not yet entitled to be judged by its highest promises. It has not yet earned the right to be asked whether it delivers social justice or economic justice. It has first to answer a much smaller question: can it be trusted to find out what happened to the men who told it, with their last words, that it could not be trusted at all.
