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Page 1: Jud cji-reforms-121216

P M Ravindran2 I I 8,' Aathira', Sivapuri, Kalpathy-67 8003

Tele : 049 1 - 257 60 42 E-mail : raviforj ustice@ gmail. com

F i I e : Pe rs/j u d-cj i-refo rm s-L2L2L6 L2 Dec20L6

Mr T S Thakur,

I understand that you will be demitting office on 3 Jan 20L7. You must already be in the

process of attending farewell functions where sycophants and those who have personally

benefiited during your career would be extolling your virtues that you must have begun

thinking that you must be one amoung the gods. I am writing to you to narrate some harsh

realities. t

Firstly, my experience tells me that between Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Mini$ter of

this country and Baba Saheb Ambedkar, touted as the Father of our Constitution, t,[ey

perpetrated the greatest fraud on we, the people, through what we rever as the

Constitution. Law makers without any prescribed qualities, qualifications or experience,

their men Fridays (popularly known as bureaucrats, who are required to help them in

decision making by collecting and collating data and maintaining records) without any

accountability and b ludiciary.which has the scope for the most whimsical decision making

being held not only without accountability and bey6nd criticism but also protected by a

totally illogical and weird armour called contempt of court, are the essentialfeatures of this

Constitution in a nut shell.

ln the 70 years afterthe colonisers left us, it has been amply proved that what we have

been having for a government, whether in the states or in the Center (and that includes thejudiciary, wouldn't it?) is anything but a government!The state of affairs would necessitate

acknowledging Winston Churchill as a prophet or an oracle!

Confused at identifying which is the worst organ of the Constitution I once set out to

analyse the malaise through first principles. And th.is is what I concluded:

Amoung the three orgons of our Constitution the low-mokers are controlled by the

people, bureaucrocy (yes, bureoucrocy, because without the octive support of the

bureoucracy no politicion can do any wrong!) and fin.olly the judiciory; the law-enforcers

ore also controlled by the low-mokers and the judiciary. AnQthen there qre the eors and

eyes of the people- the medio woiting to.sensotionalise every news involving the

misdemeanour of these outhorities. tnspite of such strict supervision and control oll thotwe con hear these days ore about politician-bureoucrot-underworld nexus even though

the fact remoins that nonb, worth the name, from this unholy nexus have ever been

punished by the holier-than-thou judiciary.

So now think how bod q system con be which is not only NOT subject to supervision butolso kept beyond critical observotion. Wel,l isn't our judiciory iust that? And do I need to

recopitulote thot quip: power corrupts ond obsolute power corrupts obsolutely?

I wouldn't waste my time reproducing whatever I have been writing about the need forjudicial reforms for the last decade and a half. But some of these have been posted as blogs

and you may go through them if you are intersted. Of particular relevance would be:

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ls the judiciary taking citizens for a ride? at h

hVDU&bloeld= 1043020674

Reforming our justice delivery system athttp: ^viforiustice. bloqspot.com al l .' form ing_ou r_iustice_deliverv-svstem. htm I

Who willjudge the judges? At hiudge_s.html

Parliamentary standing committee on iudicial Reforms athttp://raviforiustice. blosspot.cor:rr /2011 ? /pa rlia menta rv_stan d ing_com m ittee-on. htm I

httl://ravifori ustice, b lzens-revt

lndian judiciary-who said what athttp://raviforiustic€i.bloespot.com n11lo5i ind ian-iud icia_rr-u/h.-r. id-whrt. ham I

Access to Justice-A Stake holder,s Repo(http: 'viforiustice.blogspot.in f'012 ^ "cess-to-iustice-stake-holders-report.html

Democracy? East is East and West is West at http:1/www,articlesbase.com/politics_

The (Late) RTt Act at h

And there are more...

Now, coming specifically to your failures.

Through out your tenure as the cJl you have been heard harping on the judges topopulation ratio as if that and that only isthe reason forthetotalfailure of the justicedelivery system presided over by the judiciary, which in turn hasseen presided over by youduring the last few years. This, no doubt, is a fraudulent claim. ln a country where morethan 50 pc of the population is worried only about the source of'their next meal, a basicneed as per Maslow's Law of Heirarchical Needs, the issue of justice comes only at the nextlevel of security needs or may 6e even at the next higher level of social needs. Leavinghypothesis aside, let me quote some statistics I have saved of 1999 vintage (from aPowerPoint Presentation attributed to Adv.KTS Tulsi):

Cases filed in one year in lndiaMillion cases

: 13.6 Million (1.,36,68,073) cases; USA: 93.g1

Docket's per judge: lndia : 9g7 per Judge; USA: 3235 per Judge

while the second set of figures are self explanatory, the first has to be understood in thecontext of the lndian population being 5 times the population of the US of A! ln otherwords, for every one fierson filing a case in lndia there are 35 persons filing cases in the USof Al

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Report of the NCRWC- a Citizens Review at

Justice Delivery System- FAes at

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Next, is the pretention of the judiciary that it is law unto itself, which has been reiteratedeven by you, through two actions. One, when the apex court, during yourtenure, had held a

duly enacted law on the constitution of a National Judicial Appointments Commission void.And, two, the harping on the Collegiun system for appointing judges.

Anybody who knows anything about the scheme of things provided in our Constitution willhave to agree that the law on NJAC had been enacted by the due process (quite an

elaborate and tedious one at that!) specified in the Constitution. Now, when one recognises

the fact that in the matter of citizens the judiciary can and does entertain only petitionsagainst violation of fundamental rights and similar logic applies to institutions also it isshocking that this duly enacted law has been abrogated by the judiciary!

Coming to the Collegium system, again, anybody who is familiar with the facts will 6ave toagree that the judiciary had usurped the powers from the executive taking advantale of theweak'governments'led by P V Narasimha Rao and Atal BihariVajpayee. I see it alr6ost as a

revenge of the judiciary which had come under scathing criticism for creeping whenrequirgd to bend during the dark days of the Emergency,

Coming to brass tacks, it needs to be placed on record that the biggest threat to rule of lawis the total, I repeattotal, failure of the judiciary, to reform itself, move with the times and

work in the interest of the citizens of this country. As one who has been studyingthefunctioning of the judiciary fairly closely,for the last decade and half, my view is that 90 pc

of the problems in the justice delivery system is due to the incompetence, indifference and

even arrogance of the managers of the judiciary.

To cut this communication short, here are a few things which the judiciary must do urgentlybefore it becomes irrelevant and throws the nation into a civil war like situation:

L. Ensure timely disposal of cases. (By the simple principle of justice delayed is justice

denied the judiciary is a total failure!)L1,. For this the first requirement if of course having competent judges. This will

involve specialisation in subject specific laws. Though this is the'principleunderlying the constitution of various tribunals and commissions, in practice

their performance have been worse than regular courts.1,.2. Even though the number of adjournments that can be given is specifed even

in the Consumer Protection Act, they are all violate$with impunity, Just to give

an example, in OP 282199 of Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum, Palakkad (OP

No 85/95 transferred from Malappuram), the opposite party had producedinterim stay order on28/L0/99 from teh Kerala High Court and the stay wasvacated only on 8/6/2005 but through out this period the case was listed 58

times and adjournedl lt was finally posted for orders on 6/7 /07 but was openedfor re-hearing suo moto on L5/21O8 and went on an adjournment spree from3l3l0g to 3L1512O10. During this spree it was adjourned 17 times, including 5

times for want of members/President and 10 times for orders only! lt was

dismissed when an application was submitted under the RTI Act to find out thestatus I

1.3. The next is limiting the number of cases listed for hearing to pragmatic levels

and ensuring that all the listed cases are heard and progressed to some

meaningful extent.ln lower courts more than a hundred cases are listed per day

when actual hearings are conducted only in less than dozen. Most of the fewworking hours of the court is wasted in 'mustering'onlyl

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1.4. Cut out the holidays enjoyed by the judiciary exclusively. ln fact there is a

need for lower courts to work round the clock like police stations.Ensure justice is done in every case. lt is important not only for justice to be donebut for justice to be seen to be done. Unfortunately what we find is the opposite.Whether it is the final decision in Jayakrishnan master murder case, Soumya murdercase or armed forces officers rank pay case or Sahara case there are many questionsthat create doubts about the credibility, reliabiltiy and intergrity of the judiciary.Ensu re transpa rency in the processes an d fu nction ing of the co u rts. ln fact it isobnoxious that some cases linger on for decades when some, of the same category,are disposed off in a jiffy. List of cases under specific charges should be updatedatleast once in a quarter, progress evaluated and re-prioratised, if necessary.

Coming to transparency, it has to be noted that the claim of the then CJl, K G

Balakrishnan, that his office did not fall under the purview of the RTI Act had takenthe credibility, reliabiltiy and intergrity of the judiciary to new depths. !

The so called independence of the judiciary is myth. Atleast one judge, whofauas

appointed as Lokayukta of Gujarat, refused to accept the appointment stat$g that itwould be impossible for him to perform his duties when the 'executive'was not co-

operative!We all know how it is a system of 'l scratch your back, you scratch myback'that is the working model in our system of government. And that is why inspite of scams worth lakhs of crores surfacing nobody worth the name has beenpunished sd far ever! .

The totalfailure of the judiciary has led to a situation where everybody who is

anybody in government or criminals with money or muscle power tend to driveevery honest, hard working and simple citizen to the judiciary where they can simply'rest'their cases and wait for the good Lord of Death to embrace them! The needhere is for even public servants to be treated as independent litigants and made tosuffer the court processes and punished for failure to successfully prosecute/defendtheir cases. A system of rewards for'successfuly prosecuting/defending cases

involving public interest should be introduced to provide incentive for honest public

servants. (Please note that in the RTlAct, the penalty is imposed on the delinquentpublic information officer as an individual and it has been clarifed by atleast somehigh courts that if the penalised PIO has to go on appeal he has to do so at his ownexpensel Unfortunatleythe apex court has not reiterated it and hence it has notbeen implemented at the national level!)

The above list is by no means exhaustive. But it should b.e sufficient to make to think whereall you could have intervened and helped improve the situatioru And this, I must say, has

been the purpose of this communication to you.

Yours sincerely,

Sri T S ThakurCJl. Supreme Court of lndiaNew Delhi

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