Foreign Shores Are No Longer Safe Havens for India’s Fugitives

There was a time when crossing borders was seen as an escape route for criminals seeking to evade law. They forged documents and held new identities, believing that the law would gradually lose its trail. This very belief is now being dismantled by the efforts of the Modi government.

Prior to 2014, India’s extradition efforts faced challenges on several fronts. Legal complexities made it difficult to bring absconders back. After managing to fly abroad, criminals exploited these gaps as a shield against the law. During the UPA era, there was no shortage of dossiers, but the governments lacked political will to translate those dossiers into decisive action.

That era has finally been put to an end under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah’s stewardship. Now the cases of fugitives have moved from files to coordinated actions. The government’s strategy focused on three key pillars: global operations, robust inter-agency coordination, and smart diplomacy.

The result of this transformation is reflected in numbers themselves. Over the past seven years, India has repatriated 274 fugitives from 36 countries. The annual average of which is nearly ten times the annual average between 2004 and 2013.

Such results require years of sustained efforts and groundwork. The foundation for this approach was laid when the Modi government enacted the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act. It aimed at enabling stronger action against economic offenders who flee the country.

Furthermore, Amit Shah positioned this legislation as a cornerstone, and the story of this transformation gained momentum with his assumption of office as Union Home Minister in 2019. Since then, the government’s efforts have produced several notable outcomes.

The Ministry of Home Affairs designed an architecture for a more decisive crackdown against fugitives. In July 2019, the Union Home Minister introduced the National Investigation Agency (Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha. It aimed to expand the agency’s mandate to investigate terror attacks targeting Indians and Indian interests abroad, cyber-terrorism and human trafficking. Around the same period, he also spearheaded amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), enabling the Central Government to designate individuals as terrorists.

A deliberate sequence of legal and international interventions steadily narrowed the gaps available to fugitives. Each step strengthened another part of the architecture. The strict implementation of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) formed an important part of this effort. Between 2019 and 2026, the government seized assets worth ₹17,874 crore and restituted ₹18,762 crore. These included recoveries linked to fugitive economic offenders. The focus was therefore extended to disrupting the financial networks and assets.

The international dimension was strengthened further in 2022, when India hosted the 90th Interpol General Assembly. From that global policing platform, Shah articulated India’s approach around ‘Communication, Collaboration and Cooperation.’ This whole-of-government approach has created a seamless chain of coordination, from the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of External Affairs to central investigative agencies to law-enforcement counterparts abroad.

The next layer came through criminal-law reform. In 2024, the three new criminal laws introduced specific provisions relating to fugitive offenders, including, for the first time, the provision for ‘trial in absentia.' This ensured that criminal proceedings need not automatically come to a halt simply because an accused is outside India. The Union Home Minister spearheaded these sweeping legal reforms and their nationwide rollout. These initiatives added another critical element to the government’s broader strategy.

Taken together, these developments reveal a clear chronology of strengthening the legal framework, following and recovering the money, expanding investigative capabilities, building international partnerships, and closing procedural loopholes. Step by step, the government has worked to dismantle the assumption that fleeing abroad is enough to evade justice.

Laws and diplomacy can only work as effectively as the information network that connects them. That is where Bharatpol entered the picture.

Launched by Union Home Minister Amit Shah in January 2025 and developed by the Central Bureau of Investigation, Bharatpol became the backbone of India’s international law-enforcement coordination. More than 1,400 unit offices of central and state agencies are connected to the portal. Agencies now receive the information they require in significantly shorter timeframe.

The institutional machinery continued to evolve, as in January 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs established a Standing Focus Group within the Intelligence Bureau’s Multi-Agency Centre to track and pursue high-profile fugitives abroad. Fugitives who once depended on fragmented information and gaps now face a system designed to connect the dots.

None of this happened overnight. It has been the product of years of persistent commitment and political resolve. One intervention strengthened the next, and one institutional reform created the capacity for another.

Now India does not treat an international border as the finish line of justice but as the beginning of another pursuit. This is the emerging doctrine of justice of the Modi government: no border is too far, and no fugitive is beyond India’s reach.

The article is authored by Gautam Mukherjee, a political analyst.

Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this article is of the author and doesn’t reflect the views of the organisation