Write back

Four months later we find that in the Uphaar fire case the entire time and effort spent in arguments over framing of charges has gone waste because the judge who was hearing them has been transferred.

The minister’s mind may be conditioned by a lifetime spent in a certain milieu, but to a lay person it seemsclear that a drastic overhaul of the rules and practices is required. Instead of nitpicking around legal technicalities, a dose of common sense might produce better results.

Delays in dispensing justice take place because of judicial delays. It is a Catch-22 situation. A large number of cases that clog the courts are there because some people are quite certain that it is safer to let the matter go to court than to settle the dispute out of it. If they did not have such faith in the sluggishness of the systems they would probably fulfill their legal obligations without recourse to litigation.

Delays generate more cases, and breed further delays. This spiral has to be broken at some point. It is not within our capacity to expand judicial services sufficiently and to speed up justice in every area of law, but a beginning has to be made somewhere. What we need to do is to select one or two fields like political corruption or property disputes or tax litigation initially, and provide for fast track justice,from the lowest to the highest court. Concentrate on these areas and appoint enough judges only to try cases involving these matters in a manner that no adjournment will extend beyond one week.

Once justice is speeded up, and the litigants know that there is no future in the strategy of procrastination, they will begin to meet their legal obligations out of court and only cases of genuine disputes will go up for trial. The number of pending matters will drop. The additional judicial staff inducted into these fields could then be shifted to other areas.

There is one field of litigation where the government has to bear the blame for delays directly. This is where it is itself a party to a dispute. We need a mechanism whereby the state is dissuaded from going to court when its case is obviously weak. No officer will have the courage to exercise restraint because of fear of being accused of corruption if he does. Some other authority must be vested with the power to control the government’s propensity to seeka legal remedy for every issue. Even if some citizens benefit unfairly from the restraint shown by the government, their number will not be large. And someone else will get justice in the space vacated by the state in the court’s calendar.

Meanwhile, the trial procedures have to be reviewed, as Justice Gupta has pointed out. But let someone come out with new ideas instead of justice saying that we need more courts and more judges.