A Problem With Our Judicial System
Our justice machinery has kept pace with the legislative and bureaucratic legs of the democratic tripodal set up that has since 1950, when we, the people of India, gave ourselves the Republican horoscope that among other prognoses, silver lined equality before Law. Millions of cases later, doubts arise in the minds of the cognoscenti whether the broad spectrum curative balm has at every tier from the lowest to the Supreme one, made the ‘justice–hunt’ an honest joy for gliding over the creases that beset human relationships, be it individual or between the States.
Unlike other disciplines or educational grooves, legal education is a stream that leads to the uncharted ocean of law made in the law factories mostly by the laity and administered by mere statutory agencies whose brush with laws is what their subordinates tell them… These file keepers are, except a countable few, putty in the hands of crooks, who number several million. Law colleges have no moral teaching classes where Non-detailed texts are to be digested of stories of honesty and integrity that would touch a chord in their minds to dissuade them from opting for the deviant road to instant riches wearing blinkers. The result is docket mountains all the way to the judicial Everest, for everybody wants to WIN and the backers are not loath in chasing their own private schemes through the legal labyrinths, hoping that one of the justice tiers would make a mistake in his favour.
Looking at what is happening in these hallowed halls of justice, into which march Toms, Dickens and Harry without a semblance of right, except the right to pay a measly court fee and plenty to the lawyer and the disposal jam it creates, all the way to the Supreme Court, it is a wonder that there are so many judgments the law journals wade though to fill our libraries with heavy tomes.
Legal eagles in the Supreme Court fight tooth and claw for days before judges, at least one of whom, they discover is the cousin, tenth removed, of one of the parties, in whose business his grandmother has one share. This intelligence is wafted to him in a dream in which his granny asks him what is its value on Sensex! That yorks the judge who seeks recusal after two weeks of hammer and tongs in the court. The whole process has to run a second innings before a there is a new member on the bench. It is a wonder that there are only 3 crore cases pending in the courts!
The Supreme Court of USA, has only 9 judges since its inception over a 100 years ago, and the full court hears the appeals before it unlike the fractured benches in our Supreme Court, where on identical questions of law, different fractured benches pronounce different opinions flummoxing the lawyer and the laity alike. After the water war between Tamil Nadu and Kerala had gone on for weeks of word-cataract, a constitution bench of 5 judges will have the pleasure, as the Super curer, of the malignant disease that has riven the two states, provided a rowdy monsoon does not in the waiting period wash away the leaky dam to drown a couple of million people in four or five districts downstream. This is an eye-opener to the need for mandating inter-state Suits to be heard by a Constitution Bench of at least 75% of the Judges, so that none can complain about the totality of wisdom in similar battles on Constitutional matters, affecting States and hundreds of thousands of people, except lawyers, who, taking the flood to fortune, can be heard to say, “damn the dam…”
