Missing in the manifestos

Litigant distress is forgotten among the cascade of election promises

This is the time when political parties knock up manifestos. Some of them have taken down their old ones from their websites lest inquisitive persons try to check the implementation score. Parties have also made bonfires out of 2014 manifestos of their rivals in New Delhi to highlight the unfulfilled promises.

Few would remember any manifesto that seriously dealt with the crisis in judiciary persisting for decades. So no promises have been broken. There is no vote bank here, and the litigants’ distress is not on par with that of farmers or jobless youth. Several chief justices had warned the government that the legal edifice is collapsing. One of them said so before Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a public function and was seen wiping his eyes. Judges have speculated the time it would take to clear the 30 million arrears of cases, and the guesstimates run up to one or two centuries. More education, rise in awareness of rights among the people and the neglect of this sector by successive governments will bring the apocalypse closer.

Though it is well known that budgets allocate a measly 0.2 per cent for judiciary, no election manifesto has touched on the lack of infrastructure of courts. A report to the Supreme Court last month showed that the central grant to state judicial infrastructure reduced by half in recent years. A bench presided over by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi stated in court that a visit to some subordinate courts revealed that their condition was unimaginably pathetic for years. “Court rooms are dilapidated, judicial officers work in court rooms partitioned by curtains. They are expected to write judgments expeditiously,” the judges remarked. It is reported that 140 cases were pending in subordinate courts for more than 60 years.

The situation at the apex level is no better. Digging into the archives of the Supreme Court one would realise the enormity of the crisis. There are more than 260 Constitution matters that have been referred to benches of five judges. Some of them were ripe for hearing in 1992. The questions are extremely complex, like the right to property after the constitutional amendments during the 1975 Emergency. Then there are 11 matters referred to benches of seven judges. They also belong to the same old vintage and involve intricate topics like the privilege of legislature versus freedom of the media. Then there are 132 cases waiting to be heard by nine-judge benches. If those gnawing issues are to be heard by Constitution benches, the rest of some 60,000 cases in the Supreme Court would be further delayed. Many old civil appeals have titles in which the name of the petitioner or respondent is followed by (D), which means they have passed away bequeathing the files to their legal representatives. The situation in the high courts is even worse.

It would seem that politicians want the judiciary to remain the way it is. It was found recently that cases of lawmakers had gone on for three decades though the Supreme Court had ordered they should be concluded within one year. In cases involving ordinary citizens some of them have exceeded four decades. As a result, jails are overcrowded; some of them accommodating more than double their capacity. Two out of three prisoners are waiting for their trial to conclude. Many of them have spent more time in detention than the maximum prescribed punishment for their offence. Reports to the Supreme Court showed that 4.3 lakh inmates shared rooms built for 3.8 lakh. This is in contrast to the plush suite allegedly provided to a politician in a Karnataka jail or a cell in Mumbai “redecorated”, in the words of a London magistrate, waiting for a fugitive tycoon. 

These grim statistics crave the attention of the architects of manifestos. Linked to them is the nagging tussle between the government and the collegium that selects judges. However, the litigants’ anguish finds no mention in the cascade of promises showered on the economic, religious and communal sectors. The harvest is high there. It is not that the voters take election promises at their face value. But even a few words of reassurance are missing for those litigants who listlessly trudge the gloomy court buildings.