Your Honour, please clean up your act

Last week, I spent a day in a Mumbai magistrate’s court trying to post bail for the brother-in-law of a street child called Surekha whom I have known for a few years. The brother-in-law had been arrested for an alleged theft and the family could not afford bail.

Technically, the poor are entitled to a lawyer provided by the state but this rarely happens and Surekha’s family fell into the clutches of a shark who demanded Rs 4000 as his fee and another Rs 5000 for bail. People who live in the street cannot afford this kind of money but the lawyer said there was no other way.

Surekha came to me as a last resort, so it was I found myself wandering up stairways covered in paan spittle and pigeon droppings, through musty corridors and offices filled with the dust of decaying files. Anyone with illusions of the ‘‘majesty’’ of the law lose them quickly in an Indian court but even the filth might be tolerable if the system worked. It does not.

Since Surekha’s lawyer sounded obstructive on the telephone, I sought police assistance before I met him. One look at the police officer and the lawyer’s attitude changed but despite this he said I could not stand surety unless I produced a ration card, an identity card and proof that I had paid income tax for at least three years. Income tax, I gasped, how many Indians below the poverty line paid income tax? How many Indians above the poverty line pay income tax?

Those are the rules. If it had not been for the police officer’s presence he would have insisted that I produce a ration card, something that Indians living above the poverty line should be ashamed to have. After I produced copies of my income tax returns, my passport and press card I had to fill in a form that was so complicated and obscure as to confuse educated people leave alone the illiterate. It also seemed to me completely meaningless. Then, I climbed more flights of filthy stairs to a windowless room crowded with files and clerks and wrote my name and stuck my picture in a register. You would think this would have been record enough of my existence but no, there was yet another room filled with even more clerks and files to which I was dragged for another series of complicated, meaningless procedures. By the time I stood before the Magistrate it was found that the case file had disappeared. So, there were more delays while it was located in some dusty heap somewhere. The Magistrate granted bail but even after this there were more forms to be filled, more procedures, more delays. None of them necessary because all that needed to be done, in my view, was for me to have submitted the Rs 5000 as surety which would have been forfeited if Surekha’s brother-in-law jumped bail.

It must have been out of some mistaken desire to make bail possible for the ‘‘poorest of the poor’’ that bail money is not deposited in the first place but surely it would be easier for the poor to produce cash than to produce income tax returns and ration cards? Because of these foolish procedures our jails are bursting with people who are there because they cannot get bail.

Our courts, for their part, are clogged with cases that should never have been admitted if we had devised simple procedures for dismissing a case at a pre-trial hearing. Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, our judges spend their entire time interfering in the affairs of the Legislature, the Executive and in matters of governance. What about cleaning up their own act?

The judiciary, ironically, is in a bigger mess than the two other arms of government. Such a mess that judges cannot even ensure that their courtrooms do not resemble third-class railway waiting rooms. The courtroom in which I appeared is the same one in which Gandhiji, Tilak and other national heroes stood trial. It is shameful that it should look the way it does.

If preserving the dignity of our courtrooms is the business of the Chief Justice there is much that the Law Minister and Parliament need to do. A special parliamentary session on the judiciary should be the first one the Prime Minister calls after the election.

Antiquated laws, absurd procedures and prehistoric methods of administering justice should be thrown out without a second thought. No more commissions of inquiry, no more parliamentary committees, we have already had too many of those. One of our brightest and best politicians is Minister of Law so what reason is there for him to have been able to achieve so little by way of change? An answer from him could be a good beginning but in the end there is no getting away from a special parliamentary session on the judiciary and no getting away from the need for the Chief Justice to do more than pontificate to others when his own house is in such disgraceful disarray.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com