JUSTICE DELAYED is justice denied. When Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay arrived in India in 1834, he served as the first Law member of the Governor-General’s Council and worked in the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, played an important role in creating the Penal Code as a leading member of the Law Commission during later years of his life.
Later, the Indian Penal Code ie, the IPC came into existence in 1860, which was closely followed by the Criminal Procedure Code in 1872, and then the Civil Procedures Code in 1909. These laws were formulated in order to make the people of society more accountable and responsible while discharging their duties. The need for a legal framework was also felt necessary in order to keep the civil society free from criminals by suitable punishing them as per the provisions of the law.
With the passage of time several amendments were made and several new laws were also enacted in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Laws against terrorism and cyber crimes got inducted into our legal system and with the rise in population, the number of cases pending in the Indian courts also gone up. Despite our courts going hi-tech, the most unfortunate part of our judicial system remained its snail’s pace of delivering the justice.
The three tier judicial system which begins from the trial in the sessions court till the Supreme Court via the high court takes such a long time to dispense a case that ultimately it ends with anger, frustration and injustice even if one gets it, it doesn’t serve any purpose practically except in a few civil or criminal cases.
The recent attack on former Haryana DGP SPS Rathore by a BHU Gold Medalist, Utsav Sharma, outside the Chandigarh Court was one classic example of the level of frustration and anger going on in the minds of common people, who see that influential people like Rathore take advantage of our legal system everyday. Corruption has also made inroads into our judicial system and with the police instead of working and going by the law books, work as per the wishes of their superiors, things are only turning from bad to worse in the legal arena.
When Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, it took almost five years for our judiciary to deliver the justice when both her assassin Satwant Singh and the conspirator Kehar Singh were hanged to death in the famous Tihar jail on January 6, 1989. Similarly, other cases keep on dragging for years and years. SPS Rathore has been able to keep the law at bay since 1993, which resulted in this incident where a youth attacked him on his face.
It is really a dangerous trend and if the people start settling down the cases outside the walls of court, it will be disastrous for the civil society. We need to bring in some time frame in which cases must be solved out with legal remedy. The fast track courts have been doing some good work but we need to make our judiciary more accountable and transparent in order to deliver justice in lesser time. It will also send some strong signals in the society to the influential people that they can’t escape punishment for long and it would also bring down the level of corruption in the judiciary up to a great extent.
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