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Journalism of Courage
On July 23, Chief Justice of India A.S. Anand, with Justice M.J. Rao and N. Santosh Hegde, found that not a single counsel was present in any of the final disposal matters listed for that day.
The premier bench of the apex court went three times over the listed cases. But no senior, junior or advocate on record appeared. The Chief Justice started the coercive judicial process of dismissing the cases. After three had been dismissed senior advocates rushed in. Their plea was the usual one of having been held up in some other court or a different bench of the apex court.
A sad Chief Justice, distressed at this unique event in the 50-year history of the court, wanted to pass orders to prevent its recurrence. The Supreme Court Bar Association then intervened to promising to inform the general body of advocates about this event.
The Chief Justice’s bench for July 23 was one of the fairest and most pleasant, before which lawyers love to appear. Yet none of them showed up. Why did this happen? The answer liesin two critical areas which unfortunately have been left unaddressed by the apex court in the last 50 years. One is the complete absence of time-planning in our courts in general and in the apex court in particular. Second is the structure of the profession, in which senior advocates set operational norms within and outside the court, vis-a-vis the litigant and the judiciary, that negate everything that is professional. Since what is valued is not knowledge and its end-use but the monthly pay-packet, junior advocates have either joined the seniors or beaten them at their own game. The exceptions are already victims of the bad coin driving out the good.
The absence of time-planning to give a fair deal to the litigant and his lawyers shows up in the apex court in the long and uncertain wait for the regular hearing of a case. The Supreme Court has litigants from all corners of the country. Quite often, they arrive here to find that their case is being adjourned. Or they wait eternally, hoping that the case,listed every day, will actually be taken up for hearing. The apex court seems unable to take the two simple steps that would solve this problem. One, putting a fixed hour on the case list at which final hearing cases will start and miscellaneous cases will no longer be taken up. The other, to ask lawyers in all final hearing cases to file written arguments in advance and fix an estimated time for the case. If this were shown in the case list, lawyers could plan their time and be held accountable. Similarly, there should be a time limit for the delivery of judgments after a hearing is over and the public should know of judges who retire without delivering judgments. The absence of transparent judicial accountability in the use of court time makes it impossible for lawyers to plan their time in the highest court.
The court shows little respect for the lawyer’s or the litigant’s time. The mentioning of matters, which was once limited to a fixed hour, now occurs “when the normal work of the court is over”.Since there is no time limit on the normal work, advocates and litigants must simply hang around for mentioning their case, even though the mentioning list is prepared in advance. Some benches in the apex court do inform people that they would be busy with the case in hand and hence unavailable for the rest of the day. But this is not an institutional system and varies from court to court. Suddenly, some benches decide to sit through the lunch hour without prior information, though advocates and litigants might assume that no judicial business would be transacted in that hour. Similarly, there is no thinking of saving judicial time by shifting administrative matters like the categorisation of cases, the lack of service of notice, substituted service and bringing on record the heirs of the deceased from the court to the registry under the final control of the judges. For most of the year Delhi is hot, with long daylight hours. A nine-to-two working day would make sense, but it is not even whisperedof.
Advocates spend the whole day in the court, sometimes just hanging about. They hold evening conferences with their clients or seniors and read and draft through the night. The consequences of the lack of a fair and judicious time arrangement in the apex court is visited on litigants, advocates and their families. And on the hard-working section of judges, who must read through the night. All this would be avoidable if the apex court would plan its work-cycle and time-use.
But then, that requires seeing a judge’s post as one of service rather than power. Most senior advocates today convey the message of power to the rest of the profession, where silence has become a virtue. Apex court golden jubilee memorial lectures now feature flattery and hypocrisy rather than introspection and alternative thinking on law and legal management. Let us not forget that most advocates struggling for an honest livelihood are victims of this structure set up by some weighty judges and lawyers. Dismissing their cases forbeing absent is to punish the junior lawyer and the litigant rather than the senior who has reneged on the payment already made to him. Such action is judicial counter-reform that only reinforces a patently unjust and arbitrary professional structure.
