The present government’s commitment to ‘maximum governance with minimum government’ is well known. This has also been adequately reflected in the ten-point road map set out immediately after the new government was sworn in. It encompassed matters relating to economy; infrastructure; people oriented systems; education, health and water. Included also were transparency in government, building of confidence in bureaucracy, innovative ideas for governance, resolution of inter-ministerial issues, stability in government policies and time bound implementation of policies.
However, while the confidence building in bureaucracy has made
the list, an important point missing is the building of confidence in judiciary,
which is also deeply linked to the justice for the common man.
So, there is need for a debate about accelerating the measures for restoring
the confidence in the judiciary which, from the advent of civilization has been
of utmost importance as a part of good governance.
To elaborate it further, it
would be pertinent to have a look at the meaning of governance. It simply means “the action or manner of governing a state, organization ...”
and that would obviously include conducting of public affairs in a manner that
would render good justice to the subjects of a state.
It is notable that Naïf Al-Rodham, in his 2009 book Sustainable History and the Dignity
of Man: a Philosophy of History and Civilisation Triumph, had included
participation, equity, and inclusiveness as well as the rule of law in the
eight minimum criteria for ensuring good
national governance.
In this
connection, the following quotes from our scriptures, Manu Smriti and Kautilya’s
Arthashastra are also relevant:
Manu Smriti:
Chapter VIII, Para 12: “But
where justice, wounded by injustice, approaches and the judges do not extract
the dart, there (they also) are wounded (by that dart of injustice).”
Chapter VIII, Para 15: “Justice,
being violated, destroys; justice, being preserved, preserves: therefore
justice must not be violated, lest violated justice destroy us.”
Kautilya’s Arthashastra
Book III, Chapter I: Concerning Law: "As the duty of a king (and the administrators of justice) consists in protecting his subjects with justice, its observance leads him to heaven.”.
Unfortunately, however, the present
Indian legal system, a legacy of the British, is inadequate and needs a lot of fresh
thinking and corrective actions by the government.
One problem which the government has to address is the acute suffering which the common man seeking justice in India faces due to inordinate delays, high costs and limited reach to the judicial forums. This is aggravated by the fact that there is long pendency of cases in the courts. The figures are stunning. Pending cases in Supreme Court are around 65,970 (as on 1.7.2014); in High Courts around 4.5 million and in district courts over 26 million in 2013. This massive grid-locking at the judiciary needs to be undone by immediate filling of vacancies, appointment of new judges and adoption of new technologies.
Another is the restoration of trust in the
judiciary, which has been declining of late. This can be achieved by ensuring the transparency
in the judicial appointments, independence of judiciary, and institutional
checks and balances. Whether the collegium system, which works in a the exclusive
domain of judiciary in a closed environment,
and where one set of judges take decisions about judicial appointments, should be replaced by other systems with a
broader decision making platform is a matter that has to be decided by the
government expeditiously. Same is the
case about strengthening judiciary as an independent institution free from
bureaucratic interference. Otherwise, the democratic fabric of our democracy
would continue to be damaged.
There is another important perspective to these
problems, which the new government cannot overlook. By virtue of its
constitution, India is a welfare state and as per the directive principles of
state policy laid down in Part IV, the State has to promote the welfare of
people by securing and procuring effectively a social order in which justice,
social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of the
national life (italics mine).
It is imperative that the government,
judiciary and the entire legal fraternity
rise to the aspirations of the common man and generate a judicial
environment where mass public would be always comforted by a feeling that there
is a fair and unbiased institution to provide speedy justice to him.
The author Ratan Kaul can be contacted at: email@ratankaul.in
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