Just last week, the mother of all delayed cases – the Disproportionate Assets Case against former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, under the Prevention of Corruption Act – has come to a head. Jayalalithaa was in the Supreme Court yesterday, which has deemed the necessity of a swift judicial process in the hearing of her appeals. An exclusive Special Bench will be constituted to address her defence, in the Karnataka High Court, with daily hearings scheduled to finish within three months.
The story of
Jayalalitha- the 800 kg of silver, the 28 kg of gold and the 750 notorious
shoes, has become the stuff of common parlance for what signifies corruption.
In nearly two decades, the corrupting figure of Rs. 66.65 crores – crumbs in the broad expanse of corruption in
the legislature – has been featured endlessly in the media.
It is, however, a
true case of missing the wood for the trees.
An eighteen
year old case, this judicial saga has seen a remarkable trajectory that serves
to highlight one of the primary ailments of the Indian judiciary: delay.
For us at
DAKSH, the question that is far more pressing is, has justice been done by the
recent verdict in the Jayalalithaa case? It is true that this is a rare case of
a Chief Minister being brought to justice by the judiciary, demonstrating the
independence and possibility of the precept of “nobody above the law” encoded
into our Constitution. However, is it justice if it takes eighteen years to
deliver it?
Earlier this
month, Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu expressed concern over the high
numbers of pendency in the Indian courts, as one of the biggest hurdles for the
dispensation of justice in the country. On the same day, litigants who have
seen 1500-1900 dates in court, formed a human chain to stage a protest outside
the Delhi High Court, with the one statement that "We
only want justice not delay." Justice A.P. Shah famously remarked in 2011 that it
would take the court up to 466 years to clear the backlog in just the Delhi
courts.
The problem
of pendency -- all cases instituted but not disposed of, regardless of when the
case was instituted in the courts -- we have found, is a much studied one,
accompanied as it is with a widely held common sense that sees the judiciary as
several steps behind its potential in being unable to deliver timely justice. “Justice
hurried is justice buried” and
“Justice delayed is justice denied”: commonly understood maxims that
tell us that the quality of justice is very much dependent on the time taken to
deliver it.
DAKSH’s new work, The Rule of Law project ,
looks at this problem of pendency and backlog in the Indian legal system. As a
group of lawyers, sociologist and data analysts, we are excited to bring
together a different register of critical energies to understand this problem.
Our first
question at the outset of our study has been, what data do we begin to work
with? What is pendency, and how do we begin to address it in our research?
We begin our
pursuit of this study with a very preliminary and layperson’s perspective of
the legal system. The legal system exists to ensure that in case of the
violation of this personal freedom, or if a citizen has violated the legal code
of our country, justice is meted out in a qualitative manner in accordance with
the legal spirit of the country.
While we live
in a country with a vast and sprawling network of well-ordered judicial
institutions, these systems are densely congested with cases that they are
unable to see through in a timely fashion. To put it more simply, while
there exists a dynamic and extensive judiciary, the numbers of cases lodged in
the system that have not yet seen the light of day, remain an immense challenge
to the quality and delivery of justice.
As
preliminary leg work for our project, our team has carried out an extensive
review of literature to understand why this is the case. What does “delay” in
the courts really mean? How do we quantify pendency, and what amount of time is
too much, when a case is in process? Can there be a predetermined mandate for
how long the resolution of a single case ought to take in a court?
It is with
these questions that we have come to understand at DAKSH that a simple number,
statistic, or even prescription cannot hold much value in looking at this
problem.
We understand
from the literature made available by the Supreme Court itself in Court News, that there are 64,
330 cases of pendency in the Supreme Court, 44,56,232 in the High Courts, and
2,68,39,256 in the District and Subordinate Courts, as of 31-12-2012. What do
these numbers indicate? If each case in this system has been in the system for
only six months since its admission, the number appears less daunting; however,
if these cases have been in the system for years, they indicate a wholly
different tendency.
So, what is
the tendency of pendency? In a country where the judiciary can vary across
different states, where the profile of litigants and cultures of litigation
differ, what common index can help us understand the difference in what
backlogs indicate for different contexts?
In response
to various studies that have studied the problem of pendency, DAKSH has
undertaken the quantitative
task of collating and
collecting primary data that is made publicly available by the courts
themselves, to allow for further public debate and research that will hopefully
be able to throw light on the specificities thrown up by this issue.
It has been
seen that it is crucial to produce reliable statistics of the kinds of delay in
the various courts in India. Official statistics do exist, but it is not
entirely clear what these numbers indicate. More cases are registered in the
courts than are resolved, and the movement of disposals in a responsive and
qualitative manner will depend, in the future, on a management of pendency
within the courts.
Our work at The Rule of Law project is to
collect and collate data on the High Courts in the country at an all-Indian
level that can be used by researchers, lawyers, even the courts, to study the
systems of litigation in our country. As a starting point, The Rule of Law project is collecting primary data from the daily cause list that provides a detailed profile of
cases, from different High Courts in the country. Over the course of the coming
year, we will be collecting this data for all 24 High Courts and the Supreme
Court.
Stay tuned
for upcoming blogposts where we will tell you more about our method, which
has involved a lot of minute work understanding the courts, and we will present
a series of reflections and experiences in collating and organising our data,
and the challenges they pose to the study of delays at the court in our country.
* The
blog title is taken from Chief Justice of India H. L. Dattu's comment in the
Supreme Court, can be found here: <http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/as-it-happened-a-minutebyminute-account-of-jayalalithaa-bail-hearing/article6510700.ece>
