5 min readMar 1, 2026 08:11 AM IST
First published on: Mar 1, 2026 at 05:58 AM IST
Let me begin by agreeing with the Supreme Court that it is a bad idea for Indian schoolchildren to grow up believing that our justice system is corrupt. They may have seen those pictures of floor to ceiling piles of cash, some half burned, that were found last year in a judge’s garden shed in Delhi and asked their parents questions. And their parents may have prevaricated. Some truths are too harsh for innocent minds. When they are older, they will deal more maturely with the realities of our justice system but to put these things into textbooks is a transgression. At least in the eyes of the Supreme Court. Who are we to question the ‘majesty’ of justice and the men who deliver it?
Rarely have I seen our honorable judges respond with as much fury as they did last week when this newspaper drew attention to a new textbook that in a section on ‘corruption in the judiciary’ said bad things about judges. The textbook has now been removed from school curriculums, and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has been severely rapped on the knuckles, so the Chief Justice need no longer worry about the ‘sanctity of the judicial office’ eroding in the eyes of the public.
The Supreme Court has other things to worry about. Of these the two most important in my ever-humble opinion is the impossibility for ordinary Indians to seek justice, even when grievous harm has been done, because of the prohibitive cost of going to court. I have now and then tried to approach a court to get justice and have been defeated by how much it costs just to hire a lawyer. Once I had no choice as I was trying to help street people in Mumbai get bail. When the lawyer handed me his bill for that single appearance in court, I nearly fainted.
The second thing that the Supreme Court needs to worry about is the bullock cart pace at which the justice system trundles along. Every time a new Chief Justice is appointed, he gives long interviews about the reforms that he plans to bring to make justice speedier and more affordable, but things never seem to change. The result is a backlog of 5.4 crore cases in Indian courts of which 92,000 are stuck in the Supreme Court itself. But it is in the lower courts that the real rot can be seen with district courts accounting for nearly ninety percent of the backlog.
At the risk of angering the Supreme Court even more, may I point out, honorable sirs, that our lower courts look terrible. Every time I have had the misfortune to go into one of them, I have been horrified by the decay, dirt and disorder in every corner making the ‘majesty of justice’ seem totally devoid of majesty. In lesser courts in rural places, I have run into stray cattle, dogs and cats. Why is this? Why are fine old British buildings that house some of our higher courts being allowed to fall to pieces? Why are repairs so difficult?
At the start of my career in journalism, I worked in a small afternoon newspaper in an ugly little town outside London. Covering proceedings in the magistrates’ court was one of my first assignments. To my Indian eyes this court in a town of little consequence was dazzling in its cleanliness, order and efficiency. Nowhere did I see those piles of dusty files that are the defining motif of most Indian courts. Why do our courts look so bad? Why does justice move so slowly that rapists, murderers and terrorists can sometimes remain unpunished for as long as ten years? Why do we do nothing, your revered lordships, about the horrible condition of our prisons in which more than seventy percent of prisoners are undertrials?
Last week Arvind Kejriwal burst into tears when he was told, after doing jail time as chief minister, that the corruption case against him was so fragile that it did not hold up in court. The government’s immediate response was that it would appeal this judgment. Of course it will. It always does. This is why more than half the cases that clog our courts have the government as litigant. Officials do not pay for the endless litigations they initiate. We taxpayers do even when we ourselves cannot afford to go to court.
The Supreme Court has succeeded in getting rid of a textbook that said bad things about our justice system, but when will it have the courage to admit that too little has been done to bring reforms that should have happened decades ago? Something so basic as cutting down the endless and completely unnecessary paperwork in this time of computers and AI has not been addressed. If only the Chief Justice could get as enraged about these things as he did about the offensive textbook. If only he could demand that ‘heads must roll’. If only he could demand ‘accountability’ and a ‘deeper probe’, there might be a glimmer of hope that sometime soon there will be change.
That textbook is now banned but the children it sought to influence will become adults one day and discover the truth. It is only in Hindi movies that the Indian justice system works perfectly and that trials take place in fine, orderly, dignified courtrooms.
The Supreme Court has succeeded in getting rid of a textbook that said bad things about our justice system, but when will it have the courage to admit that too little has been done to bring reforms that should have happened decades ago? 
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