Our Constitution is more than 60 years old and going by the words of intelligent people it is said that, “Our Constitution has served its purpose, inspite of all difficulties, quite well”. But I disagree to it and have very deep concerns associated with it, which I would bring to the fore in this article. (although only in limited sense)

Let us start with the very purpose of our Constitution and let us see whether our very honoured Constitution has served its purpose. The purpose of our Constitution was to provide to the people of India an environment where they can feel themselves secure in the hands of a government which is responsible enough to provide its citizen just, right and virtuous legal system, opportunities, aplomb, equality in treatment, fair chance to participate and liberty to explore.

Though I have abridged the whole purpose of our Constitution to one short paragraph, but my words are straight enough to express its expectation (Problem of myopic vision associated with lawmakers will be dealt with in some other article). As our lawmakers have divided our (inefficient) state machinery into three important pillars so will I do. These three pillars are:

1) Legislature
2) Executive
3) Judiciary

We will start with the most efficient, transparent and stable of the three, i.e. Judiciary.

As is known to the majority of public that there are more than 1.5 crore cases pending in our Judiciary and the counting is increasing by leaps and bounds everyday. Even though many Fast track courts and Tribunals have been setup from time to time, there have been no signs of decline in number, though this is the status when many people are afraid of coming in a court or filing a case in a court. So we can imagine, what would have been the number of cases when all those people have surfaced in the court.

Let us do some primary dissection of a simple court case. Generally for any kind of case the minimum and maximum requirement is of two parties. Whereas one of the two is victim the other is culprit. Though the fate of the two hangs in balance by a judge, it is most of the time influenced by parsimonious lawyers. There are generally two lawyers each lawyer representing one of the two parties (although a lawyer may have group of assistant lawyers). The significance and position of these lawyers is rather very dubious. Most of the lawyers have same or higher qualification than a judge. So, in a simple case there are atleast three legally qualified people who can judge. But what is the need of two lawyers in a case when there is a judge who is qualified, intelligent, just and righteous enough to take a right decision (Even in many cases we find layman disposing their legal abilities). Also for further investigation judge gets able support from police and administration (At this juncture we would not discuss the problems associated with these two machineries) so what is the purpose of taking the help of erudite, manipulative and shrewd middleman(Lawyer), who through his manipulative skills procrastinates the decision, elongates the hearing, reduces transparency, create vagueness and at times turns the direction of justice leaving the bereaved as a pauper.

Many may argue that because:

1) Most of our people are not so educated,
2) Most of them are not so expressive,
3) Law cannot be considered to be the cup of tea of a layman, and
4) The language of law books is very skewed

It is really difficult for common man to fight for his cause and may be influential person will have the upper hand, but in today’s scenario, we can find that the influential people have the upperhand. However, according to me a judge is intelligent, just, patient and righteous enough to listen to each party’s problems and take decision alone without the company of lawyers (who act as a deterrent to transparent justice). Also many may argue that the judge may be having certain prejudices and may be influenced by some external elements. But for any such issue there is the provision for higher/appellate court which can help the system to be more transparent. At the same time lawyers can be recruited as judges who would reduce the huge backlog of cases as well as deficit of judges. May be many would object to their integrity (but if a person can be a lawyer he can be a judge as well) provided we can tackle with the problem of inconsistent judgement accordingly. This will save huge amount of money, time, energy and patience of weak, poor and innocent people in a big way and at the same time create credibility and faith in our system.

Another important issue to be addressed here is the unnecessary lingering of cases in a court. According to me the cases should not be elongated for more than 3 hearings. But, when because of some unforeseen reason it is elongated, the judiciary should be hold accountable for it and so judiciary has to provide proportionate compensation to the subject.

For more transparent judgement and a fair judgea note should be made of the performance of a judge on the basis of criteria given below:

1) The percentage of cases of a judge lasting for more than 3 hearings.
2) The percentage of judgement of court appealed at higher court.
3) The percentage of judgement upheld by higher court.

Now moving to something different but important, eventually we all consider judiciary to be the protector and conservator of basic tenets of Constitution, but, for our judiciary, it is very difficult for it to even preserve and protect itself from external influence(read corruption).

Those who have studied fair amount of law books must agree with me that the language used by our court and the various codes associated thereof (like CPC, Cr.PC, IPC, our constitution) are very much pedantic, unfriendly, ambiguous, difficult to understand, hard to conclude, follow and derive upon. But there is a basic understanding of justice which even a layman can understand. These just, right and virtuous principles should only be the guiding force in a very lucid, precise and clear language for making any judgement. Further before framing any law or making any judgement human rights should be given topmost priority. We should never forget that a human life is far more important than anything artificial made out of human effort. When I say anything artificial, it includes all laws, systems and machineries (nation-state included) created by human being including culture as well. The basic definition of democracy states that a nation-state is “for the people, by the people and of the people”. But our lawgivers have taken it otherwise and created a new definition deduced from it, i.e. citizen is “for the state, by the state and of the state” and all his obligation and dedication should be for this pseudo-body. In the above discussion I as a beholder of human justice never want to follow from it that “a criminal/culprit should be given more importance than a state”. But to reach to a judgement we should understand the crime better than assessing the socio-economic condition of the criminal, or in simple words we should judge for a crime and not for the person who is involved in it. The above mention may sound a bit contradictory, but when we look into the behavioral pattern of the judgement made till date we will find that in majority of cases, a person with better living condition than an average Indian has gone scott-free whereas the person living in paucity are the major victims of this judicial system. Can we do something for them? (next topic will be Indian executive)

So the summary is:

a) No need of lawyers.
b) Lawyers to be used as judges.
c) Simple should be the language of law.
d) Human Rights should always be the top priority.
e) All judgements should be made in 3 hearings.
f) Judgements should be more transparent.

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