Welcome to the Club! Pakistan and Bangladesh

The LA Act, 1894 and the theory of registrability....... Part2

Welcome to the Club! Pakistan and Bangladesh!

Analysis of the LA acts of Pakistan and Bangladesh proves that they are no more than photostat copies of the Indian version of the LA Act,1894.

Therefore, as stand-alone LA Acts they do not prescribe for compulsory registration of notification under LA and therefore they too are flawed as standalones. Whether prescription to that effect is envisaged by any other Act of those respective countries, will be known soon after the queries to that effect which have been sent to those countries are answered by authorities/experts in those countries.

In this respect, I am reminded of a teacher who once told a class of students:

“Never copy from others. Write on your own. Let it be bull-shit. Don’t worry. In course of time, you will learn what is right and what is wrong as long as you are aware of and sincere to what you wrote. In case you have no option but to copy from some-one, ensure that the 'some-one' has not written bull-shit”

Can anyone argue that in a country like India with over a billion population, there is not a single person or a body of persons capable of drafting a  few pages of a law without a flaw?

The number of lawyers in India is larger than the entire  national population of over 50 countries of the world.

It is understandable that having been slaves to a colonizer for over a century, when independence was won, situation was not congenial for developing and drafting laws of our own immediately, therefore we allowed the pre-independence laws to continue.

But even after half a century after independence, if we allow flawed, obsolete and undemocratic laws to continue to be in force, it will either indicate that we don’t deserve the hard-won independence or that we don’t have the right people at the right places in our social system so as to be capable of effecting  such changes in the legislation.

It is more painful to realize that it is the case of a country with over a million lawyer population.

It is evenmore painful to realize that such a thing is happening in a country which has a history of administration of justice of an epic order as exemplified by the following few instances which happened before the origin of judicial systems in many of the countries of the world today:

1. King Paari, the ruler who,  gave up his chariot for a creeper of mullai flowers to grow on.(circa 50 BC).
2. Manuneedhi Cholan was a legendary  king believed to have killed his own son to provide justice to a Cow, following  Manu's law. Legend has it that the king hung a giant bell in front of his courtroom for anyone needing justice to ring. One day, he came out on hearing the ringing of the bell by a Cow. On enquiry he found that the Calf of that Cow was killed under the wheels of his chariot. In order to provide justice to the cow, he killed his own son under the chariot as a punishment to himself i.e. make himself suffer as much as the cow. His name has since then been used as a metaphor for fairness and justice in Tamil Literature. His capital was Thiruvarur(circa 200 BC)
3. The earliest legend on justice in India is Silappathikaram where  King Neduncheziyan’s mistaken justice,  on realization brings him grief and finally death(circa 100 BC)

In this electronic age, if justice is elusive and delayed, there can be no excuse!