The Brave Pedestrian

Individuals can go on as many leaves as they like, including study leave, casual leave and sick-leave for much more than six months... but can the ENTIRE ORGAN OF GOVERNANCE remain closed for weeks or months? (And please, don't anybody mention vacation judges, who provide only a loincloth of judicial service!) Evidently, it can! And according to our ho n'ble judges, India is hale and hearty despite such institutionalized mass-bunking. http://tinyurl.com/part-time-judiciary So, let the whole country follow the noble example of our judges, and accordingly, let the government sanction SIX WEEK SUMMER VACATIONS FOR: 1) Police 2) Central & State Government, including Prime Minister, Chief Minister, entire cabinet and entire secretariat. 3) Entire Army, Navy, Air Force and Border Security Force. Let them coordinate the dates to match with summer vacations for the armed forces of Pakistan, China and Bangladesh across the borders. No surprise invasions and terr...

If pendency of cases were under control and appellants got a fair hearing, Supreme Court's six-week summer vacations could possibly have been justified. But such is emphatically not the case. Supreme Court judges dismiss a majority of the appeals instantly, not even giving a few second to appellants -- although appellants struggle for months, travel thousands of kilometres many times, and suffer great financial hardships to get a hearing in supreme court. Many of the Supreme Court judges are known to contemptuously THROW THE APPELLANT'S FILES on the floor after a couple of seconds of inattentive hearing, showing callous disregard for the litigants and the appeal process! Despite such hurried methods, the queue of pending cases before SC is growing longer every year. And, year after year, these high-and-mighty Supreme Court judges have the shamelessness to go on lengthy vacations, en masse! If this is not contempt of court by them, I don't know what is. ...

Although bail was a right of every individual, it was largely available only to the rich", says Colin Gonsalves of Human Rights Law Network. "When it comes to rich people, the court has double standards. Rich even get anticipatory bail. Salman Khan's case is a shocking case of miscarriage of justice and consideration based on class. First, it's a fit case where he should have got 10 years in jail. Two, why should his bail plea be heard expeditiously when there are hundreds such ap plications pending in the high courts. Why should he be allowed to jump queue? It sets a bad precedent," he told TOI. But that's not the only problem. Courts have also been terribly slow in disposing of cases (Salman's itself took over 12 years). Courts have 84.8% pendency in criminal cases while on an average over 60% cases take more than a year for trial to be completed. As many as 41,670 cases take more than 10 years while 1.7 lakh cases take between five to 10 years f...

If pendency were under control and appellants got a fair hearing, Supreme Court's 6-week summer vacations could possibly have been justified. But such is emphatically not the case. Judges dismiss a majority of the appeals immediately, not even giving a few second to appellants -- many of whom have travelled across the country, and have suffered great financial difficulties to come this far. Many judges contemptuously THROW THE APPELLANT'S FILES on the floor after a couple of  seconds of perfunctory hearing, showing callous disregard for the litigants and the appeal process! Despite such hurried methods, the queue of pending cases before SC is growing longer every year. And the Supreme Court judges have the sheer gall to go on lengthy vacations, en masse! Like  ·  Comment  ·  Share

The procedural delays and difficulties posed by the judiciary are NOT accidental. It is not by default, it is by design. Judiciary is designed to throw obstacles in your instinctive quest for justice. It is a tried-and-tested mechanism for INSTITUTIONALIZED DELAY & DENIAL OF JUSTICE. Judiciary gives you INJUSTICE IN MEASURED DOSES. The mindset of judges and lawyers is NOT to discover truth and give you justice, but to mercilessly break your will and subjugate you. It is their  habit to behave in this manner. In the eyes of judiciary, we continue to be subjects -- just as we were before 1947. And that is why judiciary is not answerable to the citizens. Its true purpose is to give you the feeling that you are weak, your fundamental rights are worthless, and your life and liberty are at the whims and fancies of the ruling class. Before Independence, our British rulers used the judiciary, police and army as instruments to suppress and silence Indians, who were their SUBJ...

The money-power and clout of corporates distorts our governance and judiciary. The common man's fundamental rights go for a toss wherever they are in conflict with the commercial interests of companies. For a variety of reasons, the entire judicial mechanism works in favour of corporates, leaving citizens with no genuine judicial remedies. Generally, courts are against "piercing the corporate veil" -- a handy excuse for not entering into the many wrongdoings of a company, its subsidiaries, associates and its holding companies. If courts started doing that, many false claims being made would stand unveiled! Like  ·  Comment  ·  Share

Our entire legal system -- unchanged since pre-Independence era -- discriminates between a ruling class and a servant class. Judges, politicians, government officials and the intelligentsia are the ruling class. India's British rulers did not design the judiciary for the understanding of Indian subjects and "natives". Nor did they design it to place themselves on an equal footing with the natives. They designed the judiciary to maintain an upper hand over the natives. This position continues unchanged... and that is why justice and equality remains a distant dream for most of India's 1.2 billion citizens -- especially rural people. This injustice is in the DNA of our judiciary, police and other governance structures. Until we rid ourselves of this historical curse, the judiciary will continue doling out injustice on a daily basis. Like  ·  Comment  ·  Share

Judiciary is designed for INTENTIONAL EXCLUSION of the litigant. The litigant is a "very UNIMPORTANT person" (VUP) in any Indian court. He is belittled, mistreated and deprived of every need and privilege, including information. Everybody else, including junior lawyers, clerks, peons and policemen, have priority over a litigant. Regardless of the merits of his case -- which is sometimes of great significance and public interest -- the litigant gets treated like dirt, and he i s kept in the dark about what is going on. His time, money and efforts get wasted without any consideration, and procedures and timetables are designed in ways that suit everybody else except the litigant. The work-flow, timetables, procedures etc. are decided by the constraints and the whims of judges and lawyers, and designed for their comfort (e.g. lengthy court vacations), greater privilege, convenience and profits. How can the common man even imagine that he will find justice here? ...

Judiciary is not like a pipeline meant for maximizing the output; rather, it is like a filter or a sieve that reduces the output to a thin trickle, and retains the maximum number of cases in circulation for an indefinite number of years. To deliver justice i.e. final judgments, is NOT the objective of the judiciary. Its true purpose is SYSTEMATIC DENIAL OF JUSTICE. As long as there is a superfici al appearance of a system for seeking justice, Indians are willing to tolerate an amazing amount of injustice! This deception and exploitation of Indian citizens has been going on since our Independence in 1947, when we adopted and continued the BRITISH COLONIAL SYSTEM of administration, judiciary, army and police WITHOUT ANY CHANGES

The common experience of litigants is that judiciary is NOT for implementation of the laws passed by legislature, and it is NOT for giving justice to the common man. More than anything else, judiciary is for the exercise of judge's discretionary powers, and their ability to grant "prayers" -- whether lawful or otherwise. It is for the judges' self-aggrandizement, and the enrichment of senior advocates. How can you reform a judiciary that considers law implementation and justice to be merely by-products? Like  ·  Comment  ·  Share

Judiciary is an institution for engaging the common man in an endless legal battle, from which there is no exit. It does not promise him justice, but it tells him that directly fighting against his oppressors is illegal, and therefore, he has no option except to go to court. By a subtle creeping process of institutionalized delay & procedure-based denial of justice, India’s common man is being convinced that he is insignificant, and that he can never get justice. Very slowly, year after year, as pendency increases and the possibility of getting justice grows more distant for the common man, he comes to believe in his own powerlessness. That is the creeping danger facing We The People. Like  ·  Comment  ·  Share

When members of the bar become judges in the same court (as is normal), their friendly relations or professional rivalries with their fellow-advocates will not suddenly cease. They don't stop being awestruck by their seniors, despising their juniors or hating their rivals. So, how can they be impartial? This is a structural defect in the judiciary.

If proof is needed that judiciary is completely unaccountable & shamelessly insensitive to the pain of the public, it is this: Court holidays for flimsy reasons, such as the passing away of the father-in-law of a judge or lawyer. Can't the judges, who declare such random holidays at will, see the agony of hundreds of litigants and undertrials, and their huge loss of money paid by them to lawyers? Does their unchecked power & privilege make them blind?

Every few days, the media reports a big judgment that makes it look like judiciary is a defender of democracy and saviour of human rights. But what goes unreported is that every single day, lakhs of undertrials and litigants, and their families, suffer needless pain, humiliation, disappointment, anxiety and mind-numbing expenditure. And exploitation by lawyers. These are the victims of judiciary . Nobody is interested in these victims, and their story of unending misery. Because there is nothing grand, colourful or decisive to report -- just human lives rendered meaningless in shades of muddy gray waiting outside dull, dusty courtrooms. For these victims of judiciary, media stories about grand judgments are surely like salt rubbed into their wounds!

Our Constitution gave us a medieval monarchical set-up inherited from British colonial government, and said that this is the supreme guardian of our fundamental rights. Our courtrooms are full of the stage props of imperialism, like gowns and bibs, gavels, ceremonial sceptres and high chairs. We are expected to bow and scrape and nod like bad actors in a Shakespearean drama, and mumble humble phrases like “Obliged, milord!” We write court applications on printed stationery wi th readymade slavish phrases like “For such acts of kindness, we shall ever crave”. And this institution, which encourages such archaic imperialist habits, is supposed to protect us from the excesses of our modern democratically elected government or our modern fellow-citizens, corporates etc? We are expected to move the courts to act by invoking ancient writs like certiorari and mandamus, dating back to British courts of 1000 AD -- which is completely alien to Indian jurisprudence… And this mockup of a...

Chief Justices are not supposed to be pen-pushers. They are supposed to have a GRAND VISION of justice, the BIG PICTURE of the entire judicial system. Theirs is one of the topmost jobs in the country. They are given the responsibility and independence to correct the bad practices of the past, to ensure that justice reaches the common man. They are supposed to be able administrators. But the present system of appointment, it seems, gives us only short-sighted pygmies as Chief Justices -- men who don't feel sufficiently responsible and sufficiently empowered to change the system. And so they just hold hearings till they retire and get a cushy government job. Tragic.