Columns: Fifth Column

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India Today, March 29, 1999
March 29, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
Legal System on Trail

Time to reflect on why it takes 20 years to dispose of a simple case.

By Tavleen Singh

Have you noticed how Ottavio Quattrocchi, Sonia Gandhi's ex-best friend, has been thumbing his nose at our judicial system? He is wanted in India for a criminal offence and has been requested politely by our courts to return forthwith to his former karmabhoomi but he refuses on the grounds that he does not trust the CBI. What that means is he does not trust the ability of our courts to prevent his arrest although they have ordered the CBI not to arrest him in the two weeks that he has been requested to be in India.

To me, the most interesting aspect of the Quattrocchi story is not his defiance (or his distrust) of our courts but the fact that the case against him, for allegedly taking kickbacks worth $7.34 million in the Bofors deal, was registered in 1990 and nine years on it is still merely trundling along at the pace of a bullock cart. Why should Quattrocchi take our laws or our judiciary seriously when he knows that even if he did condescend to appear in court it could take another 20 years before the case is decided? Why should anyone take it seriously?

Periodically, the press will bring to our notice the fact that in India you can remain an "undertrial" for years. Often, as happened with Phoolan Devi, you can remain in jail during this trial period so that, in effect, even if you are found not guilty at the end of it all you have still served a sentence.

But you only realise how appalling the state of our judicial system is when you talk to someone like Bibek Debroy and he tells you quite calmly that it will take our courts 324 years to clear the backlog of cases. That is, he adds, if no new cases are filed. Debroy, who has spent years writing books and papers on the flaws in the Indian judicial system, adds that it takes an average of 20 years for a case to be disposed of in our courts -- if it isn't land-related. If there is land involved the story -- as so many of us know -- gets much grimmer.

Now, consider that the average Indian lives in a village and that in villages most litigation involves land and you realise how hopeless the judicial system becomes when it functions, if it ever does, in rural India. In those years when people like Jaya Prakash Narayan spent their time in the badlands -- the Chambal ravines -- persuading dacoits to lay down their arms, us hacks used to be routinely despatched from Delhi to discover why dacoits became dacoits.

I personally interviewed enough dacoits to do a book on the subject and almost in every case there was a land problem involved. A problem that those who became dacoits knew could never be solved in the courts.

Another interesting piece of information that I obtained from Debroy is the fact that in 65 per cent of our civil cases it is the government, in some form or the other, which is the litigant. Most of the cases should never have been brought to court. Allow me to give you only my own humble example, for what it is worth when you consider the enormity of the problem. The New Delhi Municipal Council had me in court for 10 years in an attempt to prove that I should be paying the house tax that would have been due if I were earning rent from my flat. This is a matter that could have been settled in one day since I had documents to prove that my flat had never been rented to anyone. But the NDMC remained adamant and wasted taxpayers' money on an utterly useless case.

How many more such cases must there be? And if this could have happened to me "of the English-speaking elite", as Medha Patkar once described me, then think what happens to an illiterate villager?

So is there a solution? Most Indians who have suffered at the hands of our judicial system will tell you that there isn't one. They will tell you horror stories of corrupt judges and evil lawyers and hopeless situations. But, according to Debroy, a solution can begin with Parliament having a special session on litigation.

There lies the real reason why our criminal-judicial system is in the mess that it is in. Our honourable members of Parliament, even the best of them, get easily excited when it comes to some sidekick in the Finance Ministry making unsubstantiated charges. They can disrupt the House on account of demands for a joint parliamentary committee on the subject. They can get equally hysterical over, for instance, the dismissal of the Bihar government. But when it comes to something truly important like the fact that the backlog of cases in our courts will take 324 years to clear, then there is virtually no murmur of protest.

We in the media are not blameless either. Because not many of us have faced anything more serious than the occasional libel charge since those dark days of the Emergency, we tend not to come into sufficient contact with the judiciary to pay it much attention. Also, we are scared. Judges are very good at initiating contempt proceedings against the likes of us. We are, after all, nobody's ex-best friends. If we paid the judiciary more attention though we might discover that one of the biggest flaws in the system is that even preliminary hearings, which decide whether a case should be tried at all, take more than three years in India. Can we then even claim to have a judicial system?

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