Citizen Participation And Whistle-Blower Protections In Anti-Benami Enforcement: Comparative Insights From India, The US, And The UK
- IJLLR Journal
- 48 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Mr. Vikas Saharan, Research Scholar, School of Law, Sushant University, Gurugram
Dr. Anjali Sehrawa, Associate Professor, School of Law, Sushant University, Gurugram
ORCID: 0000-0002-0739-2575
ABSTRACT
Envision a country where large territories of property are hidden behind a series of fictitious names, hidden owners, and opaque legal arrangements and the citizens who should be exposing them are quiet, oblivious, or unprotected. This is not a hypothetical situation, but is an ongoing challenge of nations grappling with the benami scourge, India being no exception. Although the Prohibition of Benami Property Transactions Act 1988 (amended in 2016) was a legislative overhaul, it has a 'flexible foundation' upon which it has relied almost exclusively on duly established institutional machinery, whilst neglecting the two critical foundations: public legal awareness, and whistleblower protection. This paper argues, notwithstanding the fact that an anti-benami regime now exists in India; a routine comparison shows that although legally strengthened, the regime is culturally asymmetrical. The legal approach of this investigation will be both doctrinal legal analysis, as well as the comparative legal analysis of statutory provisions from: Sections 3, 5 and 54 of the PBPT Act and India Whistle Blowers Protection Act 2014; and international models from the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia the study reveals that India’s approach remains enforcement-centric and citizen-averse. The Ministry of Finance, the Standing Committee on Finance (2022-2023), and the Enforcement Directorate's observational data are reviewed to better understand actual outcomes, which reveal a notable absence of informant participation and legal literacy. In interrogating this civic disconnection, the paper contends that urgent legal reforms for procedural protections for whistleblowers, public outreach, and co-constructing a participative context of compliance is necessary. Ultimately, this study advocates not just for reformulating the anti-benami framework as a punitive governance mechanism of financial scrutiny, but as a democratically oriented model of public engagement, constitutional accountability, and economic legitimacy.
Keywords: Benami Law; Public Legal Awareness; Whistleblower Protection; Enforcement Mechanisms; Socio-Legal Reform; Financial Transparency.
