|
FIFTH
COLUMN
And
Justice For All
If cases
are decided in weeks instead of decades, few people will dare to be corrupt
By
Tavleen
Singh
It
could be because the gods look more benignly upon India at Dussehra when
we celebrate-as we have for thousands of years-the victory of good over
evil. Or it could just be a coincidence that we have seen a former prime
minister and a former demi-goddess chief minister convicted of corruption
in this season of propitiating the gods. P.V. Narasimha Rao for buying
the votes of MPs and Jayalalitha for selling herself Tamil Nadu government
land at much less than it was worth. Despite the convictions it's hard
to see Jayalalitha doing hard labour for the next three years, as part
of her sentence, or Rao spending his remaining years in some gloomy cell.
Something will surely save them from punishment but the convictions bring
a tiny measure of desperately needed hope in a judicial system so inefficient
that most Indians have lost faith in it.
 Much
needs to be done if that faith is to be restored and it is in the hands
of the judiciary and the Law Ministry to do it. Yet, whenever the question
of reforming our decrepit judicial system comes up we find all the main
players take up defensive positions. From the judiciary we hear that the
reason why it will take us more than 300 years to clear the backlog of
cases in our courts is because we have too few courts, too few judges,
too deficient a system. And from the Law Ministry we hear that simplifying
laws will take a very, very long time since there are 2,500 Central government
laws to be examined and when we get to state laws we are talking of nearly
30,000. So law ministers have come and gone and nothing has been done
despite experts having made any number of excellent suggestions like the
calling of a special session of Parliament on litigation. This particular
suggestion came from Bibek Debroy who has spent so much time studying
the flaws in our legal system that it compelled him to write a book called
In the Dock: Absurdities of Indian Law. Will Union Law Minister
Arun Jaitley please read it?
Unless we
can get the justice system to start working at least as efficiently as
it did in the Rao and Jayalalitha cases we can be sure that corruption
will continue to flourish and grow. Evil will continue to triumph over
good and we only have to glance around us to see that it already does.
Dismal
Record: Remember the fire in Delhi's Uphaar cinema three years ago?
Remember that 59 innocent people lost their lives because the cinema's
management was criminally negligent? The men responsible should have already
been in jail but they are out and about and will be for a long time because
the process of putting the evidence together in the case has not yet been
completed. Remember those bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 that killed more
than 200 people? Well, it is pretty much the same story with that case
so it requires little imagination to know that in a country where it takes
an average of 20 years to bring murderers to justice corrupt officials
and politicians can go about their business in peace. And, they do.
It is because
of corrupt officials and politicians that our most sacred rivers have
become sewers. Crores of rupees have been washed down the Ganga because
the action plan to clean it leaked like a sieve. Instead of trying to
plug the holes the government announced an action plan to clean the Yamuna
and we can be sure that this will go the same way. Corrupt officials are
the reason why we may soon have no forests left in India and, if what
happened to that poor tigress in the Andhra zoo is an indication, we may
soon have poachers hunting animals in our zoos. It is also the reason
why we spend thousands of crores of rupees on roads that disappear annually
with the first monsoon showers and why we provide other public facilities
so substandard that we would do better to stop wasting our money.
Our only
hope lies in making the justice system work as it should. As an ordinary
citizen may I make a few simple suggestions? Judges should be given deadlines
so that day-to-day hearings become necessary. Television cameras should
be allowed in the courtroom so that we know exactly whom to blame for
delays. A special Doordarshan channel should be dedicated to this purpose.
Lawyers who cause needless delays should be debarred. Pre-trial hearings
should eliminate flippant cases like the one filed-and admitted in a Delhi
court-by a man who claimed to be Priyanka Gandhi's husband. And finally,
government departments-responsible for nearly 70 per cent of our civil
cases-should be banned from going to court unless absolutely necessary.
By taking only these small steps we could have a justice system that could
make all the difference.
Top
|
Relics
of old empires exist everywhere. Why can't the Mani Shankar Aiyars of
India let them be? asks INDIA TODAY Senior Editor Ravi Shankar in
