Your
Honour, we the citizens of this great Nation welcome you to the august post
with a lot of expectations. Your worthy predecessors have left you with an
unenviable task of managing quite a mess and I, a samanya nagarik (ordinary
citizen), who is scared of entering the temple of justice because there are no
exit doors, am honestly scared of the courts. Justice is delayed beyond all
reasonable limits of time and generations have perished without justice being delivered and guilty being
punished. Government remains the main litigant in your courts and for lesser
mortals like us you hardly have any time left.
Your Honour, while I am scared of annoying you, may I most
respectfully ask you is our judiciary accountable to anybody? I know there is
God up there, but let’s not bother Him with our business. The judicial tardiness has
emboldened the goons, the thugs, the cheats, the corrupt politicians, the
inefficient babus and the unprofessional police force. Justice is running so
far behind them that there is no way it will catch up with them in this
lifetime. With
30 million pending cases, over four million in the High Court and 65,000
Supreme Court, the poor are worst affected while the rich can afford expensive
lawyers and change the course of dispensation of the law in their favour! Under
such circumstances how can I be optimistic with your assuming the high office
Your Honour?
Corruption in judiciary is no more a hush hush affair. The
various recent scams like the CWG scam, 2G scam, Adarsh Society scam, including
rapes and other atrocities in the society etc. have emphasized both the conduct
of politicians and public dignitaries, including the common man, and also on
the drawbacks in the functioning of Indian judiciary. Pointing fingers towards
the halo however is not possible on account of the fear of contempt. There is
no provision for registering an FIR against a judge taking bribes without
taking permission from your office, So,
Your Honour, those who
are meant to uphold the law are way above the law!
There is a total lack of transparency in the functioning of
your haloed office Your Honour. For some reasons best known to your brothers in
the bar the legal mammoth system which you preside upon is totally out of the
ambit of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Thus, in the functioning of the
judiciary, the substantial issues like the quality of justice and accountability
are not known properly. The Indian judicial system still incorporates certain
features inherited from the British judicial system during their centuries of
colonial rule in India. We have to do a major overhaul of "de-Britishising"
of the system. Is there a continuing education programme for our judges? Are
they upgrading themselves with the changing times? Laws that criminalize
homosexuality, should they be staying in your books? Why has computerization and
digitization not acted as the steroid shot, which the system so badly needs? Why
is all this hushed in a conspiracy of silence?
The plight of the undertrials, who are denied justice for
ages, is worse than pitiable in our jails. Often the expenses and pain and
agony of defending themselves in courts is worse than serving the actual
sentence. Why is there no committee constituted by those in the stratosphere of
the legal system to act against the stalling tactics of the lawyers? The rich
and powerful people can bring the police and the law to their sides, and the police can
harass or silence inconvenient and poor persons, during the long ordeals in the
courts. And I am not even willing to mention the plight and public humiliation of
victims of rape and domestic violence when they stand in front of your brother
judges pleading for justice!
Another big concern which I have is that the judiciary and
the common man never interact and so fail to sensitize each other. We do not
have the jury system and so the common man is invariably a litigant. He is
never a part of the judicial decision making and so never considers the
judiciary to be his own.
When
information and communication technologies are rapidly changing the life of our
countrymen dramatically, the India legal system still looks like a domineering
and pretentious Imperial vestige appearing to belong to an elite class and far
away from the common people and our country. Don’t you feel Your Honour your
system of justice is totally out of place and out of time and tune with
democratic procedures and norms, that please only a certain section of the
society with vested interests.
I wish the
Honourable Supreme Court gets down to the more serious task of reinventing
itself, making itself more relevant to the society it is expected to serve and clearing
its own backlog. It is very easy to point fingers at every Tom Dick and Harry,
be a fortune teller and predict riots and arson after demonetization one day
and serve judicial populism the next day admonishing political parties not to
ask for votes along the lines of caste, creed and religion, but introspection
is the need of the hour. Why should the courts run only one session and that
too with a long lunch break? Why can't we have evening courts? If other
professionals can work round the clock, why can't the legal profession do the
same? The hospitals do not close their shutters at 5 PM. The Airlines, the
Railway, and even the Metro construction goes on round the clock. If judges are
less than optimum in numbers so are the doctors, but they never complain. The
shoulder the extra burden and they deliver. When will the legal fraternity stop
complaining and start delivering?
Am I
asking for too much Your Honour?
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