I’m recycling my old article since it has far greater relevance even today in the light of developments that are taking place in judiciary and bureaucracy.

If the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi is done with his personal fetishes like co-operative federalism, same-system-better-result, catch petty tax chors, etc. in his first 5-year term in Delhi in order to establish his ultra-democratic and pacifist credentials, in his post May 2019 term he must get down to tackling some really serious issues facing the nation. 

NaMo must understand that this nation urgently needs a Lee Kuon Yew and not a Gandhi or Nehru or ABV to redeem what seems irredeemable at the moment. Thus it calls for some hardheaded, unsparing, and unabashed revolutionary zeal, approach and actions to pull the nation back from the precipice of chaos and disintegration.   

He should stop listening to the buzz in his head and start paying heed to the cries of people. He must seek their mandate to take some of these recalcitrant bulls of our polity by their horns and harness them to ensure a culturally and emotionally integrated India develops holistically and at a faster pace. And the issues I’m enumerating below do not require detailed research and analysis to be discovered, they stare in your face. 

Dealing with the Indian justice delivery system, the red-eyed egotistical bloated bulls in black coats

These bulls have done immense harm to Indian democracy in two ways. 

A. They have miserably failed to deliver justice to Indian citizens

B. They have, time and again, intervened in the domain of the executive and other autonomous institutions, have scuttled the due process, abused their absolute powers to arrogate the rights of the state to themselves and made a mockery of the Indian Constitution   

A. They have miserably failed to deliver justice to Indian citizens

If the courts in finicky legally literate nations like the UK and the USA take a few years to complete a trial and appeals process, in a country like India they should be completed within a few months. Just the opposite happens. Average time to complete a trial and appeals process in India is 25-30 years and it costs millions and thus pushes the common citizenry beyond the pale of justice delivery mechanism. 

That’s an unpardonable crime against humanity committed by the state, the judiciary, and the bar. It protects criminals and torments honest citizens. Had I been the Prime Minister of India I would have unabashedly bulldozed, shamed, and even hanged the sleazy judges and devious senior lawyers and solicitors who indulge in tactical lawyering to save their crooked, corrupt & criminal clients. 

While NaMo took on the corruption of comparatively small-timers using extraordinary steps like demonetisation in his first term, the big fish like the Gandhis and the Chidambarams and the Kochars and the Dhoots and the Modis and the Mayavatis, and the Mamatas didn’t feel the heat as much. The system continued to favor them and they kept getting away. The extra-ordinary measures needed to deal with them were not employed. 

He will be better equipped to employ such measures in his second term. For this he must be ready to sacrifice his pacifist image for the sake of our nation and welfare of people. He must take on the bull of judiciary by its horns without bothering about the outcry of the establishment. He must be willing to tell the judiciary and the bar that they will be held accountable for delay in justice delivery and more than 2 years in completing the trial and appeals process in civil and criminal cases will be totally unacceptable. 

This is not arbitrary guesswork by an ignoramus like me. The Prime Minister can ask his learned Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to conduct a brief one-week desk study to understand this. The trial of a serious case is ACTUALLY completed in maximum 10 to 15 hearings consuming about 75 or 80 hrs. of court’s time and it’s an extremely generous estimation. Some trials like a case under Section 138 can be finished in just 15 minutes of hearing by an alert and discerning judge.

It’s a mockery of justice when we see that a case of a pathetic Bollywood star who broke the law and killed a black buck took 20 years to be judged in a trial court. It may take another 15 years before the appeals process is completed. Obviously the relatives of the deceased black buck did not cause the delay in what can be considered prima facie an open and shut case. The big time lawyers employed by the star, the prosecutors, and the judges were clearly complicit in delaying the case. A careful study of the case will corroborate what I stated earlier. The case could have been tried and verdict delivered in 10 to 15 hearings by a good conscientious judge and a determined prosecutor who was not overawed and intimidated by the battery of big lawyers employed by the star.

I have been a personal witness to how some really good judges have delivered smart and solid judgments within weeks in far more complex and voluminous cases than Salman Khan’s. So, it’s not that nothing can be done if the justice delivery system works with integrity. The simple way of doing is to debar and disrobe the lawyers known to practice tactical lawyering and disqualify them from future judicial appointments. 

At the same time the judges who are found complicit in delaying cases must be impeached for their corruption and sleaze without any hesitation. If these judges can hang criminals, there must be a way to hang the criminals among them. 

B. They have, time and again, intervened in the domain of the executive and other autonomous institutions, have scuttled the due process, abused their absolute powers to arrogate the rights of the state to themselves and made a mockery of the Indian Constitution   

Public Interest Litigation (PIL) is the biggest joke played on our nation by the highest judiciary of the land. It’s nothing but a means to allow some power-hungry judges to usurp the power of the executive and feel good about it without being accountable to the people of India. 

Yet again a cursory glance at the PIL based judgments will tell you that nearly 90% of these have made things worse for the citizenry instead of helping it. These judgements do good to the devious and dubious causes served by a few lawyer activists and vainglorious judges who believe they know more about governance than the government and are wiser than the elected representatives and policy framers of India. 

We have seen how some of the SC judges worked in cahoots with the Sonia regime and carried out a witch-hunt against the Govt. of Gujarat and Narendra Modi prior to 2014. These judges delivered exceptional judgments that were so bad that lower courts and even various High Courts of India as well as the apex court, refused to accept them as legit precedents, citations and references. 

In fact PIL’s have been used as extra-Constitutional means to usurp the power of the executive and various autonomous institutions that are key to the successful functioning of a democracy. We know how some judges have questioned the authority of the President of India and other Constitutional bodies like the Parliament of India and the Election Commission of India. 

Narendra Modi has allowed his mandate to be weakened by bizarre and unprecedented judicial shenanigans and by not taking a firm stand on important legislations like the Judicial Accountability Bill. This has encouraged the Sonia stooges embedded in judiciary and bureaucracy and his devious opponents to use the apex court to thwart his policies and programmes time and again and brazenly impinge on the executive turf. It seems the Union Cabinet and the Prime Minister and even the Parliament of India have to get all their decisions approved by the judges of the apex court before implementing them. 

The unwillingness of the Prime Minister and the BJP leadership to take on the egotistical bloated bulls in black coats and gowns who have been running amok and roughshod over constitutional provisions during Modi’s first term is one of their major failings. They cannot continue doing so post May 2019. The bull of Indian Justice Delivery system must be taken by its horns and harnessed. It has done a lot of damage by its wild runs in the past four years. 

Rajesh Kumar Singh

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