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By Tavleen Singh in India
Today, October 21, 2000
If cases are decided in
weeks instead of decades, few people will dare to be corrupt
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. In addition, from
the Law Ministry we hear that simplifying laws will take a 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.
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 who 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. Finally, government departments
- responsible for nearly 70 per cent of our civil cases - should be banned
from going to court unless necessary. By taking only these small steps we
could have a justice system that could make all the difference. |
