Tainted Mandate

Mumbai’s narcotics enforcement apparatus has once again found itself in the dock. The booking of Amit Ghawate, the Narcotics Control Bureau’s (NCB) Mumbai zonal director, in connection with a suicide case is not merely an aberration. It is the latest episode in a pattern that raises uncomfortable questions about the conduct, culture and accountability of one of the country’s most visible law-enforcement agencies.

Ghawate, a 2008-batch Indian Revenue Service officer, now faces serious charges under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including abetment to suicide, extortion and criminal conspiracy. The case stems from the death of Gurunath Chichkar, a Navi Mumbai builder who allegedly shot himself in April 2025. According to investigators, a suicide note pointed to sustained harassment by NCB officials pursuing his son, Naveen Chichkar, an alleged kingpin of a transnational drug syndicate.

It speaks volumes when a premier anti-narcotics agency, tasked with dismantling criminal networks that span continents, now finds one of its senior-most officers accused of tactics that resemble the very coercion and illegality it is meant to combat.

This is not the first time the Mumbai arm of the NCB has courted controversy. The tenure of Sameer Wankhede, Ghawate’s predecessor, was marked by headline-grabbing drug busts and equally explosive allegations. Wankhede’s tenure, once hailed as emblematic of a no-nonsense crackdown, now reads more like a cautionary tale in institutional overreach. His high-profile raids, most notably the Cordelia cruise ship case, initially projected the image of an officer unafraid to take on Bollywood, business elites and political networks alike. Yet, as allegations of extortion surfaced, alongside claims of selective leaks and procedural improprieties, the narrative began to fray. Investigations by central agencies into his conduct cast a long shadow over cases that were once trumpeted as breakthroughs.

The recurrence of such controversies suggests something deeper than individual misconduct. It points to structural incentives that reward spectacle over substance.

The Chichkar case is instructive. Law enforcement agencies often argue that pressure is an unavoidable tool when dealing with hardened criminal networks. Yet the line between legitimate investigation and harassment is a thin one. If the allegations against Ghawate hold, they indicate not just a failure of judgement but a systemic tolerance for excess.

Such excess is particularly dangerous in the context of India’s stringent narcotics laws. There is also a broader institutional cost. Public trust in enforcement agencies is a fragile commodity. When successive Mumbai NCB chiefs become synonymous with scandal, it risks turning the agency’s regional office into a byword for controversy rather than competence.

The NCB’s mandate is both necessary and daunting. But effectiveness in such a battle depends not only on aggression but on credibility. An agency that appears compromised cannot command the cooperation it needs from the public or from other institutions.

In the war on drugs, the state must occupy the moral high ground. When its agents descend into controversy, that ground begins to shift irreversibly.