Reform the Raj-era judicial system
Aprominent businessman, who also represents the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’S point of view, said to me recently, “If there’s one place I would never like to be in, it’s a court, because I know I will never get justice there.” I was reminded of the brilliant Indian Civil Services officer Penderel Moon who never liked sitting as a magistrate in court because he knew he would be told streams of lies and all he could do was record them.
Then I also remembered the Delhi magistrate who asked the public prosecutor, “I know perfectly well that you are bringing paid witnesses before me every day, but why do you have to bring the same witnesses every day?”
Last weekend, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi had to hear what the Chief Justice of India (CJI) thought about courts and the trials that take place there, and it was a story that once again reminded me that, to modernise
India’s governance, just digitalising is not enough. There are fundamental faults in the administration of justice and other institutions connected with it and they need fundamental reforms.
Speaking at the joint conference of chief ministers and chief justices of high courts last weekend, the PM said, “The government has taken various initiatives for improving infrastructure and integration of digital technology in e-courts proceedings. The e-courts project is being implemented today in mission mode.” This may well be so. When the CJI spoke, he indicated that a lot still needed to change. For instance, he blamed the government for its addiction to the courts, pointing out that their litigation, often department-versus-department, accounted for half the cases awaiting the attention of the Supreme Court (SC).
Much of this litigation would be saved, according to the CJI, if Parliament debated bills clause by clause. That it is not doing, when bills are passed in a matter of minutes. Many of the farmers who protested against the three farm bills have said the distress they suffered could have been avoided if the bills had been debated, and amendments were accepted.
I was particularly interested in the CJI’S complaint about the rising pile of petitions his court faces. They are often cases in which the court has ordered governments to take action and they have failed to do so.
This seems to be a classic example of the malfunctioning governance, the laxity, evident in almost all Indian governance. If the SC can’t enforce its orders, what hope does a rural divisional court have?
The enforcement of court orders is often handed to the police to enforce and they must surely be one of the institutions most in need of radical reform in India. One of the achievements of Morarji Desai’s Janata government was the appointment of the police commission. They produced much-praised reports, which were shelved by Indira Gandhi. The latest parliamentary report on policing published this February doesn’t indicate that there have been effective changes or reforms under consequent PMS. The report “notes with anguish that the public image of the police throughout the country is more on a negative side.” It suggests that “inculcating soft skills in police personnel should always be the priority and focal point of their training modules.”
The call for inculcating soft skills is further evidence of this fundamental fault in Indian governance. When India became independent, members of the Constituent Assembly wrote the longest Constitution of that time, but they left the governance of the democracy to institutions they inherited from the Raj. That is why India still has a Raj-era police dedicated to the hard task of maintaining order, with no time for the softer skills that parliamentarians have called for. The dark shadows of the colonial past hang over the proceedings of the SC too. E-courts alone won’t clear those shadows away.
The views expressed are personal