Here's a **comprehensive, up-to-date summary of the Supreme Court (SC) order / position in the ongoing Enforcement Directorate (ED) vs. Mamata Banerjee matter (as of 15 January 2026) — a high-profile legal and political dispute related to ED's raid on I-PAC and allegations of obstruction:
www.ndtv.com
The Times of India
"Disturbed By What Happened In High Court": Supreme Court On Mamata Banerjee vs ED
I-Pac raids drama in SC: ED alleges CM barged in, accuses her of theft; Mamata calls it a 'blatant lie'
Today
🧑⚖️ Supreme Court's Key Orders / Directions
⚖️ 1. SC Has Issued Notice — Hearing in Progress
The Supreme Court has issued notice to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and other state officials — including senior police officers — on the ED's petition alleging obstruction of the probe. The notice requires them to respond to the ED's allegations. �
The Times of India
⚖️ 2. Stay on FIRs by West Bengal Police
The court stayed all FIRs filed by the West Bengal Police against ED officers relating to the I-PAC raid. This effectively pauses police action against central agency officials until further SC orders. �
Republic World
⚖️ 3. Preservation Directions
SC directed that CCTV footage and other recordings from I-PAC premises and nearby areas be preserved while the matter is under examination. �
Republic World
🗓️ 4. Next Listed Hearing
The matter has been posted for further hearing on 3 February 2026. The court has ordered a counter-affidavit from the respondents (state and officials) within the prescribed timeline. �
Republic World
🔎 What the SC Is Considering
🧱 ED's Allegation
The Enforcement Directorate is arguing before the Supreme Court that:
During its raid on the political consultancy I-PAC and related premises in Kolkata (linked to a coal-pilferage/money-laundering investigation), there was interference and obstruction by the West Bengal government, including actions by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
ED claims the CM and state police took away evidence and demoralised central forces.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court this reflects a "shocking pattern" of interference by the state. �
The Times of India +1
👩⚖️ SC's Stance
The Supreme Court has described the allegations as a "very serious matter" and expressed concern — particularly about:
A chaotic situation in the Calcutta High Court hearing related to the same issue, which was marked by disruptions.
The potential conflict between a state government and a central probe agency, something the court said could lead to lawlessness if not resolved judicially. �
Live Law
🧩 Positions of Parties Before the SC
👮 ED's Position
ED has sought directions from the Supreme Court, including (among other things) a CBI inquiry into alleged obstruction.
The agency alleges state interference and improper removal of materials during its lawful search. �
Bar and Bench - Indian Legal news +1
👩 Mamata Banerjee / State Government
Mamata Banerjee denies ED's allegations, calling them "blatant lies" and politically motivated.
The state government filed a caveat in the Supreme Court, asking that no order be passed without hearing it. �
The Times of India
📌 Context from Calcutta High Court
Before going to the Supreme Court:
The Calcutta High Court disposed of a TMC plea seeking protective orders, after ED told the court it had not seized any data during the raids. �
Moneylife +1
🧠What This Means
🟡 The Supreme Court has not yet finally decided the merits of the case — it has taken interim measures (like issuing notice and staying FIRs) while the dispute between a powerful federal investigative agency and a state government is further examined.
🟡 The next significant development will come at the February 3, 2026 hearing, unless the court issues interim orders before then.
2 comments:
continued)Bryson, Bill (2010-01-22). A Short History of Nearly Everything: The bestselling popular science book of the 21st Century: Transworld: And what else is out there, beyond the solar system? Well, nothing much and a great deal, depending on how you look at it. In the short term, it’s nothing much. The most perfect vacuum ever created by humans is not as empty as the emptiness of interstellar space. And there is a great deal of this nothingness until you get to the next bit of something. Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri, which is part of the three-star cluster known as Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but still a hundred million times further than a trip to the Moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least twenty-five thousand years, and even if you made the trip you still wouldn’t be anywhere except at a lonely clutch of stars in the middle of a vast nowhere. To reach the next landmark of consequence, Sirius, would involve another 4.6 light years of travel. And so it would go if you tried to star-hop your way across the cosmos. Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings. Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is over 30 million million kilometres. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any travelling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely. Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion – and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life existing in the cosmos, based on a series of diminishing probabilities. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally – yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions. What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means, for a start, that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs – people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from these observers is likely to begin ‘Dear Sire’, and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.
So even if we are not really alone, in all practical terms we are. Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion – a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. ‘If we were randomly inserted into the universe,’ Sagan wrote, ‘the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.’ (That’s 1033, or 1 followed by 33 zeroes.) ‘Worlds are precious.’ Looking into the past is, of course, the easy part. Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it – not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them. For all we know, the North Star, our faithful companion, might actually have burned out last January or in 1854 or at any time since the early fourteenth century and news of it just hasn’t reached us yet. The best we can say – can ever say – is that it was still burning on this date 680 years ago. Stars die all the time. A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns1, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. ‘It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once,’2 says Evans. If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners, according to Evans – ‘it would wreck the show,’ as he cheerfully puts it. But the universe is vast and supernovae are normally much too far away to harm us. In fact, most are so unimaginably distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle. For the month or so that they are visible all that distinguishes them from the other stars in the sky is that they occupy a point of space that wasn’t filled before. It is these anomalous, very occasional pricks in the crowded dome of the night sky.For the blast of a supernova explosion to kill you, he explained, you would have to be ‘ridiculously close’ – probably within ten light years or so. ‘The danger would be various types of radiation – cosmic rays and so on.’ These would produce fabulous auroras, shimmering curtains of spooky light that would fill the whole sky. This would not be a good thing. Anything potent enough to put on such a show could well blow away the magnetosphere, the magnetic zone high above the Earth that normally protects us from ultraviolet rays and other cosmic assaults. Without the magnetosphere anyone unfortunate enough to step into sunlight would pretty quickly take on the appearance of, let us say, an overcooked pizza. The reason we can be reasonably confident that such an event won’t happen in our corner of the galaxy, Thorstensen said, is that it takes a particular kind of star to make a supernova in the first place. A candidate star must be ten to twenty times as massive as our own Sun, and ‘we don’t have anything of the requisite size that’s that close. The universe is a mercifully big place.’ The nearest likely candidate, he added, is Betelgeuse, whose various sputterings have for years suggested that something interestingly unstable is going on there. But Betelgeuse is fifty thousand light years away. Only half a dozen times in recorded history have supernovae been close enough to be visible to the naked eye16. One was a blast in 1054 that created the Crab Nebula. Another, in 1604, made a star bright enough to be seen during the day for over three weeks. The most recent was in 1987, when a supernova flared in a zone of the cosmos known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, but that was only barely visible and only in the southern hemisphere – and it was a comfortably safe 169,000 light years aw
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