Sanction for prosecuting a public servant looks, on paper, like a stamp: present or absent, granted or refused. 

Courts have long treated it that way, as a box to check before a trial begins. 

But the law asks harder questions first: Was sanction needed at all under the statute in force when the alleged offence occurred? Who held the authority to grant it? Did that authority actually look at the material, or simply sign what was placed before it? And does the precedent a judge reaches for actually interpret the statute in front of him, or has a rule built for a different law been carried over without anyone checking whether the words match?

That last question decided the fate of a retired officer named Ghulam Rasool Baba.

Sanction exists because not every bad decision by a government servant is corruption. 

A road contract awarded on flawed advice, a file cleared in haste, and a procedure skipped under pressure are the ordinary failures of administration, and the legislature did not want them prosecuted as crimes without a second set of eyes examining the file first. 

The safeguard was built to protect the business of governing, rather than to protect the dishonest. It is a fence around honest error instead of a wall around theft.

Before 2019, Jammu and Kashmir ran on its own law, the Prevention of Corruption Act, Samvat 2006, separate from the Central statute that governed the rest of the country. 

Section 6 of that Act barred a court from taking cognizance of corruption charges against a public servant without........

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