1993 blasts and lessons in delay

Justice finally began to be done last week but is far from being done because there will inevitably be appeals and more endless procrastination, thanks to ancient procedures and hoary technology. It will now take Justice Pramod Kode several weeks to pronounce judgment on the 123 people charged with perpetrating a terrorist act that killed nearly 200 people on March 12, 1993, and destroyed the lives of those they left behind.

If we had an effective, modern justice system, the men who committed this evil act should have been punished 10 years ago. Instead, several of the main perpetrators continue to live happily ever after in Karachi and Dubai, and others like Yakub Memon dare to mock the justice system in court without any fear of contempt.

When found guilty of conspiracy Yakub reportedly shouted these words at the judge: 8220;Voh Tiger Memon sahi bolta tha, koi insaaf nahin milega. Tum log hame terrorist banake chhodoge. He was right, there is no justice here, you people will make us into terrorists.8221;

Make us terrorists? Was March 12, 1993, a rehearsal? This from a man who fled with every other Memon in his extended family to Dubai just before the bombs went off. This from a man whose brother Tiger is charged with being the main conspirator, this from a man who has been found guilty of financing the evil enterprise. And he dares to talk like this in an Indian court?

Something has to be very seriously wrong. It is. Everything about the justice system needs to change, starting with the urgent need to clean up our courts and restore their dignity. Many of our courts are housed in buildings so fine they should be protected monuments. But enter them and you see paan-stained walls, smelly corridors in which stray dogs and cats wander, and courtrooms that look as if they have not been cleaned since the British left.

If justice has to be associated with the word 8220;majesty8221; then the minimum requirement is a clean courtroom.

Let us now discuss the sort of outdated procedures that cause trials to drag out over decades. In the Mumbai bomb blasts case 123 suspects were tried.

A large number, but did we need a case file that was 40,000 pages long, 15,000 pages of charge sheets, 3,000 pages of submissions and 14,000 pages of evidence?

The short answer is: No.

Then, there is the peculiarly Indian practice of judges writing detailed judgments instead of explaining as briefly as possible why they have found someone guilty or not.

Add to this the problem of pre-historic technology. Justice Kode took three years to begin delivering his verdict. If he were using a computer he might have been able to produce three legal tomes in that time.

There are other reforms required urgently. Judges must be paid decent salaries. As things stand a junior judge is paid around Rs 15,000 a month, while a two-bit lawyer can make that much money in one court appearance.

The tragedy of the Mumbai bomb blasts case is that not only has justice been painfully delayed but the police appear to have learned no lessons either.

In 1993 I remember watching policemen stomping around in the stock exchange bomb site when it should have been cordoned off and searched with a sieve for evidence.

To my horror I saw the same thing happen after the train bombings of July 11. If the people who run our criminal justice system are to learn nothing from their mistakes then we have already lost the war against terrorism.