The chaos that afflicts India’s governance system is by now a gross national embarrassment. Justice R Banumathi, one of the three woman judges of the Supreme Court, only added to this embarrassment when she stated in her farewell address on Saturday that her own family remained a victim of judicial delay and apathy. She cited the case of her father who died when she was at age two in a road mishap, and how her family waited all these years for compensation, which only got mired in legal “complications”.
If this is the case of an elite educated family, the plight of the ordinary citizens should only be worse. This is the India that shamefully holds its head some 70 years after Independence. Most of the great systems that the British Raj introduced here before it left have by now been taken to their deep depths, while governmental inefficiency, bureaucratic corruption and political loot are the order of the day.
A recent revelation in India Justice Report 2019 was that subordinate courts in the country are clogged with as many as 28 million cases – and that some 2.3 million of these cases are pending for the last 10 years, and 6.7 million cases for five years. Lakhs of cases are pending in each of the high courts and the scenario at the apex court could be equally worse. As the adage goes, justice delayed is justice denied. Worse, whether ordinary people who form some 80 per cent of the billion plus population have the ways and means to fight their cases for so long should be a cause of grave concern.
As governments change after every five years, as per democratic norms, bigger issues like these get untouched even when leaders with a so-called 56-inch chest run the nation. Systemic strengths are gradually eroding, and successive governments are taking little interest in setting things right. Governance itself has become a hugely corrupt practice while national interests take a back seat. Democracy’s strengths are proving to be its main problems too as is evident from the sense of anarchy that prevails in India’s banking and other sectors of the economy. Even Parliament meets are chaotic and marked by routine disruptions instead of discussing issues of national interest.
While the Covid pandemic has added to the nation’s woes, and things are in a state of paralysis, this is also time for the nation to see how the future can be secured and how survival in the shadow of a behemoth like China could be seriously addressed.