Justice in India moves with the velocity of a dial-up modem in a monsoon.

It’s been months—years, really—since Leena Paulose, the wife of the world’s most prolific jailhouse hustler Sukesh Chandrashekhar, started her latest stint behind bars. Now, the Supreme Court has finally weighed in. Their grand verdict? They told someone else to deal with it. Specifically, they’ve asked the Delhi High Court to hurry up and decide on her bail plea. It’s the judicial equivalent of clicking "Remind Me Later" on a critical system update.

If you haven’t been following the Sukesh saga, congratulations on having a life. For the rest of us, it’s a masterclass in how a single guy with a burner phone and a silver tongue can make the entire state apparatus look like a collection of bumbling interns. Sukesh is accused of pulling off a ₹200 crore (roughly $24 million) extortion racket while sitting inside a high-security cell in Tihar Jail. He didn't use a tunnel or a smuggled file; he used spoofing technology. He made his calls look like they were coming from the Union Law Secretary’s office. He wasn't just breaking the law; he was conducting a stress test on the government's digital trust.

Leena Paulose isn't just a bystander in this mess. The authorities claim she was the COO of the operation. While Sukesh was busy playing God over a cellular signal, Leena was allegedly handling the logistics, the money laundering, and the optics. She’s an actress by trade, which makes sense. This whole story feels like a mid-tier Netflix thriller that got greenlit by an algorithm on a bender.

The friction here isn't just about whether a celebrity-adjacent fraudster gets to go home. It’s about the massive, grinding gears of a legal system that can’t keep up with the speed of a modern scam. The Supreme Court's nudge to the High Court highlights a specific, ugly truth: the process is the punishment. Paulose has been in custody since late 2021. In the tech world, that’s three generations of iPhones ago. In the Indian legal system, it’s a Tuesday.

The court's latest directive is a classic bit of procedural hot potato. By asking the High Court to decide the bail plea "expeditiously," the Supreme Court isn't actually making a call on the merits of her case. They’re just tired of the paperwork sitting on the desk. It’s a polite way of saying the delay is getting embarrassing.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the tech used to commit these crimes is light-years ahead of the tech used to adjudicate them. We’re talking about AI-driven voice cloning and sophisticated spoofing apps, while the courts are still drowning in physical files tied with literal red tape. The ₹200 crore price tag on this heist wasn't just for the luxury cars and the Versace slippers the couple reportedly enjoyed; it was a tax on the system's inability to verify who is actually on the other end of a phone call.

We love to talk about the "frictionless" future, but the Chandrashekhar-Paulose case is all friction. It’s the friction of a jail where guards can be bribed to look the other way while a prisoner runs a shadow empire. It’s the friction of a financial system that allows tens of millions of dollars to disappear into the ether before anyone notices a red flag. And now, it’s the friction of a bail hearing that’s been stuck in a loading loop for months.

Leena’s lawyers argue that she’s a victim of her husband’s ambitions, or at the very least, a woman entitled to the same "innocent until proven guilty" courtesy we extend to people who don't have a fleet of seized luxury SUVs. The state, of course, says she’s a flight risk with the resources to disappear into a non-extradition sunset.

The High Court now has to pull the trigger. They have to decide if Paulose is a dangerous collaborator or a convenient scapegoat. But don't hold your breath for a speedy resolution. In a world where we expect instant gratification and 5G speeds, the Indian judiciary remains stubbornly, painfully analog.

It’s almost impressive, in a grim way. We’ve built a society where you can lose your life savings to a guy in a jail cell in five minutes, but it takes five years for a judge to decide if that guy’s wife should get to sleep in her own bed.

If the Delhi High Court actually manages to make a decision by the next fiscal quarter, will it even matter? The money is gone, the victims are scarred, and the tech Sukesh used has already been replaced by something harder to trace. We’re still trying to figure out the rules for the last war while the next one is being fought in an encrypted chat room we don't even know exists.

So, Leena waits. The High Court deliberates. And the rest of us get to watch the slow-motion car crash of a legal system trying to catch a ghost.

How many more millions have to vanish before we realize that "expeditious" isn't a legal strategy, it’s a fantasy?