Devangshu Datta: The wheels of justice grind slowly

VIEWPOINT

In April 1999, Jessica Lall was shot while serving alcohol (or rather, shot for refusing to serve alcohol) in an unlicensed Delhi bar. On February 27, 2002, there was a fire in a train at Godhra railway station, which sparked violence across Gujarat. One of the nastiest incidents occurred at the Best Bakery at Baroda, where 14 persons were burnt to death by a mob on March 1, 2002.

The prime accused in the Lall shooting, Manu Sharma and several other persons, were acquitted in February 2006 by a Delhi sessions court. In March 2006, the Supreme Court imposed a jail sentence on the key witness in the Best Bakery case, Zaheera Sheikh, on grounds of perjury.

Both the cases have led to accusations that forensic evidence has been tampered with; witnesses have changed testimony umpteen times; the police have been in the dock for messy paperwork and an improper recording of confessional statements, etc. The search for scapegoats is now being pursued with commendable enthusiasm.

These two high-profile cases helped focus attention on one of the murkiest aspects of the Indian justice system. The outcry may induce changes in police procedures. It may also, in the long run, lead to the institutionalisation of witness protection programmes (that is, programmes designed to protect witnesses from threats as well as to shield them from bribery).

But why did these cases take so very long to be processed? If those cases had been tried quickly, it would have been far more difficult for the ungodly to subvert the course of justice.

Notwithstanding all the other problems, tardiness is the worst attribute of the Indian justice system; India delivers justice at a pace that suffers in comparison to the average glacier.

Justice is a service. It has to be delivered by any self-respecting state. It underpins everything by providing a safe environment and dispute resolution mechanisms.

If a waiter cannot serve booze (or refuse to serve booze) for fear of being shot, or a member of a minority community cannot run a bakery for fear of incineration, it is a failure of the justice system.

Murders and riots are spectacular events. But systemic tardiness causes huge daily opportunity losses in more mundane ways. Property owners hesitate to rent for fear that it will take decades to evict a tenant in arrears. Joint ventures are not signed for fear of interminable disputes. Multi-crore business empires are placed in stasis by succession struggles.

All these losses are caused by slow service delivery, not by lack of legal provision. Evicting a defaulting tenant simply takes too long. It takes an extra decade to exit a JV gone sour in India.

When it comes to succession disputes, we have the contrasting outcomes of the Ambani imbroglio versus the Priyamvada Birla case. Dhirubhai was a smart man; he left the succession unclear. The family took less than a year resolving matters. Mrs Birla left a will, which will be disputed indefinitely. Nowhere else in the world is there such a clear payoff in avoiding due process.

In an era where every other service delivery mechanism has improved, the Indian justice system has got worse and worse. You can file income tax returns online, you can walk into a showroom, buy a vehicle and get it financed inside one hour. A telephone connection is available within a day, as is a gas connection. But a legal dispute circa 2006 takes as long or longer, as it did in 1966.

There is the usual problem of a shortage of trained human resources""there aren't enough judges. Cases can be adjourned at the drop of a hat and given that contingency fees are illegal, lawyers have reason to drag out matters. There isn't enough leveraging of IT. Ludicrously, courts take long vacations in a scenario where there is a backlog of over a century.

None of this would take rocket science to remedy. But are India's legal eagles capable of bringing their laser-eyed perception to bear on themselves?