A lesson for India

In less than six months of Mark Anthony Stroman shooting Vasudev Patel, an Indian gas station owner in the US, he was arrested, tried and se...

In less than six months of Mark Anthony Stroman shooting Vasudev Patel, an Indian gas station owner in the US, he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. The defendant attributed the shooting to rage over the September 11 terrorist attacks but it did not cut any ice with the jurors. The prosecution was also able to link him to the killing of a Pakistani and the blinding of a Bangladeshi. Compare the swiftness with which the case was disposed of to the manner in which similar cases are dealt with in India. It is now more than a decade since one of the worst communal riots occurred in Bhagalpur but the verdict is yet to come on many of the cases. Even in older incidents like the 1984 riots, most of the accused are yet to see the inside of a jail, what to speak of getting a proper punishment. Forget such mass murders, even the notorious tandoor murder case in the Capital is yet to come to its logical conclusion. Around the time Harshad Mehta engineered the securities scam, rogue trader Nick Leeson broke Britain8217;s Bearings Bank. Even after the latter was released after undergoing punishment, Mehta was nowhere near punishment. Death, finally, liberated him from the case.

There are thousands and thousands of such cases which expose the weakness of the Indian judicial system. Though the jargon 8216;justice delayed is justice denied8217; is often mentioned, even in simple straightforward criminal cases, the sessions courts take a decade to give their verdicts. Then there are appeals going right up to the Supreme Court. It may have been embarrassing to hear the Pakistani President ask why India was unable to deal with the terrorist, Omar Sheikh, while he was in Indian custody for several years. Whatever may have been his purpose, General Musharraf was pointing to an obvious drawback in our criminal justice system. Statutory bodies like the Law Commission have suggested umpteen measures to quicken the system and clear the huge backlog of cases. The Constitution Review Commission has also chipped in with some valuable suggestions. Doing away with long-winding arguments, replacing oral submissions with written statements, introduction of a jury system to hear certain type of cases, allowing plea-bargaining whereby the accused pleads guilty of some charges and accepts punishment, limiting the number of appeals and compulsory recording of statements of witnesses before a magistrate so that they cannot withdraw them at a later stage, are some of these suggestions. However, the vested interests have seen to it that the system remains as cumbersome and outdated as ever.

Think of it, if the system was speeded up, it would have even obviated the need for many harsh laws like Poto and its forerunner, TADA. Instead of frittering away its energy on enacting laws that are progressively harsher, the government would have done well to simplify the existing laws and procedures to ensure a quick justice delivery system. After all certainty and quickness of punishment are greater deterrents than the harshness of punishment. It is the tortuously slow manner in which the wheels of justice move in the country that encourages the mass murderers of Gujarat to strike again and again. And, needless to say, with impunity.