NEW DELHI, May 1: Your Lordship, may this humble plaintiff make this humble plaint that we cannot comprehend what your Lordship says. Involved Victorian usage and obscure Latinisms have conspired to make the language of Indian courts incomprehensible to all but the few who make it their business to deal in them.But things are changing. On Monday, courts in England and Wales will, by order of the Lord Chancellor's Department, discard the jargon that has for centuries clouded legal transactions and use a language that people understand. From henceforth, a plaintiff will be called a claimant and he or she will file a claim form, and not a writ.It is a move that lawyers and judges in this country welcome. As Hardev Singh, a former secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association, puts it, ``We have been talking about doing precisely this in India for decades, but somehow we haven't got anywhere.''Singh had in 1973, as secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), moved a resolution asking for theterm ``Lordship'' to be done away with.Incidentally, the former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar, had lobbied for such a move even earlier. ``In 1971 - I was at the time a judge in the Delhi High Court - I had written to the chief justice of the Supreme Court, arguing for discarding the expression, `Your Lordship'. A little later, the Supreme Court had also passed a resolution on the need to do this.''Sachar points out that in no democratic country is such a term used. In the US, judges are addressed as ``Your Honour'' or ``Sir''. Besides, a term like ``defendant'' is coming in for increasing use there - the expression is ``State versus the Defendant'' rather than ``State versus the Accused''. Simplification of usage also mean demystifying the law and making it more accessible to people. ``We use the term `writ' for an application for judicial review. We need to not just simplify these words, but to Indianise them as well,'' believes Rajeev Dhawan, senior advocate, SupremeCourt.Words like ``benami'' and ``vakkalat'' are common legal currency now and make so much more sense in the Indian context, he states.Perhaps it is consumer law that has the most user-friendly terminology, according to Sandhya Dhabolkar, a Mumbai-based High Court lawyer. ``There is a crying need to make court terminology more accessible to people. Simple things like wills, that affect everybody, are crowded with terms like `executrix' and so on. What is an `executrix', after all? She is really a person put in charge of handling affairs, so why can't it be written like that?'' she says.Dhawan has, however, some words of caution. ``But when we Indianise these terms we must not go the Doordarshan way and Sanskritise it - this would make them even more complex,'' he warns.Besides this, there are certain terms of art in legal practice - that is, expressions that have acquired a specific meaning, like ``eminent domain'' for instance. Dhawan stresses that care must be taken to ensure that themeanings of such terms are not lost in the simplification process.Anil Nauriya, a Supreme Court advocate, emphasises the need to correct the adverse social impact of traditional legal usage. ``For instance, when we seek a relief from the court, we call it a `prayer'. Why can't it be termed a `request'? Prayers do not constitute the language of democracy. It's as if justice is a matter of someone's grace, rather than the claimant's right.''But he also believes that the process of change must not end just with words - anachronistic and irrelevant practices must also be done away with.To clinch his argument, he points to the garments lawyers wear. ``These black roes are truly killing in hot weather because they absorb heat, and those bands resemble dog collars and cut into our necks.''Now is that a plaint or a complaint?
