What prevents our courts from speeding up the litigation process and coming to a conclusion within months of a case being filed?
With the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Special Court Judge K Sanal Kumar pronouncing the verdict in the Sister Abhaya murder case in Thiruvananthapuram, sentencing Sephy and Thomas Kottoor to life imprisonment, an important chapter in this sensational murder case has been closed. However, this is just temporary as the accused are likely to appeal against the verdict in the Kerala High Court and then in the Supreme Court.
It was a drawn out case because Sister Abhaya, a novitiate in the Saint Pius X Convent at Kottayam in Kerala, was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a well on the convent premises on the morning of March 27, 1992. The Kerala Police which probed the case initially, concluded that it was a clear case of suicide. To substantiate their findings, police officials alleged that Abhaya was from a family which was prone to mental distress and which had a history of suicides. Though it has been more than 28 years since Abhaya was found dead, no journalist could substantiate the claims of the Kerala Police. Apart from pronouncing the death as suicide, the local police as well as the Crime Branch unit were competing with each other to destroy the evidence. A local photographer who was hired by the police to take the pictures of Abhaya’s body destroyed irrevocably most of the photographs which showed nail marks on her neck.
A murder which took place in 1992 has come to a conclusion after nearly three decades thanks to the perseverance of two individuals, Joemon Puthenpurackal, a social activist, and Raju, a petty thief who witnessed the entire drama live while hiding in a tree in the convent.
A lot could be written about Abhaya’s murder but the issue before us should not be confined to this case alone. There is a dictum “justice delayed is justice denied.” If we follow this principle, Abhaya has been denied justice. Not only Abhaya, there are thousands of people in India who have been denied justice. What prevents our courts from speeding up the litigation process and coming to a conclusion within months of a case being filed?
The first time I heard a speech by Narendra Modi was in January 2009 when he flew down to Chennai to deliver a keynote address at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. Modi, who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at that time, centred his speech more on the development initiatives his Government was taking. He had said that his mission was to ensure a “zero backlog” of cases in all courts in the State by 2010. It is hard to tell what the current situation in Gujarat courts is. But if instances like the Abhaya murder case are any indication, India is light years away from reaching a zero backlog. This has had a detrimental impact on the lives of many.
A prime example of this is the case of the late MKK Nair. The senior bureaucrat, who belonged to the first batch of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers in the country, had his wonderful career cut short by fake cases slapped against him by a CBI officer in Kerala.
Eventually, the trial court found that all charges against Nair were trumped-up but the damage had been done by then. Nair should have retired as a Cabinet Secretary in 1977; instead, he was suspended from service in 1973. It took more than a decade for the court to acquit him of all charges. It cannot be said that he got justice. Plus, the country lost the services of a visionary who was the architect of Udyogmandal in Kerala that contributed a lot to the Green Revolution.
Similarly, AIADMK candidate Manoj Pandian, a legal luminary who contested the Assembly election from Cheranmahadevi constituency in 2006, was defeated by P Veldurai of the Indian National Congress. Pandian challenged the election in the court and it took five years for the apex court to declare Veldurai’s election as illegal, null and void. The verdict came on the day when the people of Tamil Nadu were on their way to elect the new Assembly!
In the 2009 election, P Chidambaram, the Congress candidate from the Sivaganga Lok Sabha constituency, was declared defeated initially. But the counting was stopped for a few hours and then it was announced by the Returning Officer that he had won the election, defeating his nearest rival Raja Kannappan by 3,000 votes. Though Kannappan challenged the result in the Madras High Court immediately after the poll, the Madras High Court is yet to pronounce the verdict, though the country witnessed two Lok Sabha elections (2014 and 2019) since then.
However, it is not just cases related to elections that get delayed in the courts. What happened to the 2G Spectrum Scam which was broken by The Pioneer in 2007? The Coalgate scam? The National Herald case initiated by Subramanian Swamy or the illegal telephone exchange case? Why are we plagued by this inordinate delay in our courts? It is no wonder that kangaroo courts are flourishing in Tamil Nadu and even people who have reached the age of superannuation have enrolled as students in law colleges in and around Chennai. It is a sad state of affairs that justice keeps on getting delayed and hence denied in the country. Hopefully, the new year will bring a renewed effort to clear the backlog of court cases in India.
(The writer is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal)