Justice: Doomed to be delayed

Oh bother. A Cabinet reshuffle seems to be coming up. We wait. Like hungry guests wait for their food to be brought back at a once grand but now shoddy restaurant after some spirited soul demands that the stained tablecloths be replaced by clean ones.

You know you will finally settle for another stained, if freshly laundered, tablecloth. And you suspect that the food — cooked in some roach-infested kitchen — will be cold by then. Yet you wait, because that is the thing to do.
So we wait for the Cabinet reshuffle. It looks like railway minister Pawan Bansal will get the sack. And that law minister Ashwani Kumar will get a “transfer” order like erring officials do. Perhaps their replacements will be clean, upstanding leaders. But if they wish to get anything done, these fine ministers will have to then operate within this phenomenally unclean system. How can they not be contaminated?
Take the railway scam. Someone bribed the railway minister’s nephew to corner a great job for himself. So? That even lowly jobs are sold for a price and through connections is not exactly news. Often policemen who are likely to catch such scamsters have themselves bought their seats in the force for a huge sum, and are focused on recovering costs through bribes from others. Sure, it needs to stop. But for that you need a system overhaul. A gesture, like sacking Bansal, could be a start, but is not enough.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, bless the soul of Indian justice, has expressed shock and horror at the CBI’s (Central Bureau of Investigation’s) genuflecting to the government. How could law minister Ashwani Kumar and other government functionaries examine and tinker with the CBI’s status report on the Coalgate investigation? “The CBI has become a caged parrot speaking in its master’s voice,” said the court. And added that “the heart of the report was changed on suggestions of government officials.”
Of course it was. And everyone from the law minister to attorney-general G.E. Vahanvati was involved in tweaking it. That’s what they are expected to do. The CBI is not an independent organisation. It does not even have the autonomy that the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) or the Election Commission (EC) has. The Central government controls its every move — from recruiting officers to hiring a lawyer. Ever since his retirement, former CBI chief Joginder Singh has joked about how “the CBI Director needs government permission even to go to the bathroom!”
Earlier, the Supreme Court in the Jain Hawala case (Vineet Narain vs Union of India) had tried to distance the Central Vigilance Commissioner and the CBI from the government. It did not work. For years lawyers, activists and commentators have been harping on how the CBI cannot be truly effective unless it is independent. How it needs to be headed by someone with complete autonomy, like a Supreme Court judge or the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC).
Which may not be failsafe either. Remember the tiff last year between former CEC S.Y. Quraishi and former law minister Salman Khurshid? The minister had claimed that his ministry had some control over the EC, prompting a complaint by the CEC to the Prime Minister. This was around the time that the EC had served a showcause notice on the law minister for promising a special sub-quota for minorities while campaigning in Farrukhabad during the Uttar Pradesh elections.
So law ministers are not necessarily finicky about the law. Take the way Mr Khurshid chose to deal with allegations of corruption by the capped crusader Arvind Kejriwal. The activist had accused the law minister’s charitable trust for the handicapped of being involved in financial irregularities and forgery. “I was made the law minister and asked to wield the pen. But now it is time to replace ink with blood,” thundered the minister. And welcomed Kejriwal’s plan to visit Khurshid’s home turf, Farrukhabad. “It is a long road to Farrukhabad… He can get there, but how will he return?”
Soon after, Mr Khurshid was made Union minister of external affairs. Clearly, muscular straight talk has its uses.
As does the law. But only when we are committed to justice. Tokenism or putting up a show does not help. Justice delayed, we shout, is justice denied. Yet justice is doomed to be forever delayed in our wretched country of great laws and terrible lawlessness.
This week, after three decades of waiting, we saw three of the accused in one case of the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi get sentenced to life imprisonment. Two other politicians got off only with three-year jail sentences, and went home on bail. Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, who was supposedly leading the pack, had been given a clean chit last month. The rest of the accused are now dead.
This was the judgement of a district and sessions court and will of course go hopping up to the high court and Supreme Court and hang in there till all the witnesses and the accused die of old age. Like H.K.L. Bhagat, the late Congress minister who was widely believed to be an instigator and leader of the killer mobs at the time.
Why does it take three decades for us to get a response from the first court of justice? To allow time the destroyer to wipe out memories and erase evidence? So that the accused can meanwhile lead their lives happily, climb the political ladder, and smile when the court shrugs and says — too bad, not enough evidence? So that leaders like Sajjan Kumar can get the benefit of the doubt?
The delay in justice delivery, Chief Justice Altamas Kabir has lamented, is a serious problem of our justice system. One reason for that is the paucity of judges. India has only six judges for every one million people, as compared to 125 judges per million people in the US. Unless things change, our current backlog of cases will take centuries to clear. And then there is the matter of corruption among lawyers and judges. A couple of years ago, former law minister Shanti Bhushan had publicly stated how the judiciary was getting increasingly dishonest and gave the Supreme Court names of eight corrupt chief justices of India.
Political interference in law is just part of the deep rot that is making our justice system dysfunctional. For a full system recovery — and we do have a very fine system — we need more than cosmetic changes like a Cabinet reshuffle.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine.