On 3 October 2023, the Supreme Court held that the Directorate of Enforcement must furnish the written grounds of arrest to a person arrested under Section 19 of the PMLA as a matter of course and without exception. Merely reading the grounds out, or letting the arrestee read and sign them, does not satisfy Article 22(1) or Section 19(1) — and an arrest made without written grounds, together with the remand that follows, is vitiated. The judgment also censured the ED's clandestine second ECIR, recorded to defeat the anticipatory-bail protection the appellants had just secured, and set aside the contrary High Court view in Moin Akhtar Qureshi. This is the PMLA origin of the written-grounds rule that Prabir Purkayastha later carried across to the UAPA and arrests generally.
The Supreme Court's 1994 ruling that the power to arrest and the justification for using it are two different things — and that an arrested person is entitled to have a relative or friend told. A close digest of the safeguards that prefigured D.K. Basu.
On 7 February 2025, a two-judge bench held that communicating the grounds of arrest under Article 22(1) is a mandatory constitutional requirement, the breach of which vitiates the arrest and entitles the accused to release despite statutory bail bars.
On 1 April 2026, a two-judge bench applied Mihir Shah to an NDPS arrest, holding that failure to supply written grounds of arrest before remand renders the arrest illegal even where section 37 ordinarily forecloses bail.
On 15 May 2024, the Supreme Court held that grounds of arrest must be furnished in writing at the earliest, declared the NewsClick editor's UAPA arrest illegal, and extended Pankaj Bansal beyond PMLA.