Dear All,
This was reported in "Times of India, dated 01 February'2010, Mumbai edition, page 01".
(read article, as reproduced below, as written by reporter Mr. Santosh Desai)
THIS IS "TOO" IMPORTANT TO NOT TO UNDERSTAND (or say that this is too important to ignore)
Keep Smiling .... Hemant Agarwal
A WEAPON CALLED ILLEGAL TIME
It took 16 years to get a verdict in the Ruchika case (nine years to register an FIR) and 17 years to get a report from the Liberhan commission (it was originally given three months to do so and received 48 extensions). And as we all know, these are by no means exceptions; it is normal for court cases to drag on for decades. Enough has been said about the many shortcomings of the judicial system in India and there is hardly any articulated disagreement among most commentators about the need to overhaul it.
The problems in doing so are many, but one of them is certainly that delays in justice are not a product of systemic deficiencies alone and occur in part because of a deliberate intent to this end. If Justice Liberhan had indeed produced a report three months after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, he would delivered a political hot potato of a spectacularly indigestible kind. It would have been incumbent upon the government to initiate some action, and risk polarizing the electorate far too sharply for its comfort. Seventeen years on, the report is of symbolic value only, and that is also being way too charitable. In retrospect, the Congress might well feel that it took the right call—with the Babri Masjid gone, the BJP has struggled to create an umbrella under which it can expand and intensify its appeal and action against key leaders at that time might have cascaded into a more sustained movement. Of course, that is speculation, but it does point to the uses delays and prevarication can be put to, particularly in a democracy which demands a certain transparency in the way we enact and enforce laws.
The use of time as a weapon manifests itself in different ways in India. The stay order is a judicial weapon founded on institutionalised stasis. The court decides not to decide and lets status quo prevail an interim form of remedial justice. Having frozen things in their place, it often proceeds to take years, even decades to unfreeze things, by which time the final judgment often becomes irrelevant.
Delaying justice does more than deny it, for it works towards preventing us from seeking justice in the first place. The idea of going to court is far too daunting for anyone but the most needy or the most judicially adept. More subtly, by building in time as a variable, the notion of what is a just resolution is itself altered. In many cases, the judgment, when it comes, bears little or no relevance to the reality of today’s circumstances.
The power of time has in fact grown with time. As things move faster, as our interest peaks and withers away in ever shorter time spans, slowness becomes a potent counterforce that challenges the very foundation of our lives. For unlike the past when out of sight did mean out of mind, we are increasingly entering a world where it is tantamount to being out of existence. By making all phenomena more intense and by dramatically speeding up the world, we have created a sense of perpetual motion that leaves us with little room for reflection and remembrance. Yesterday’s headlines disappear from the dustbins of our memory with clockwork efficiency. Remember Nithari, the minister who walked into a lion’s cage, the girl molested on New Years’ Eve in Mumbai, Prashant & Amit who ruled over the hearts of two North Eastern states, the cash-forvotes scandal that seemed to have rocked the very foundation of our democracy at the time? With so many new scandals, new films that need to be promoted and reality shows that occupy our minds, how can we possibly remember anything older than three months? Once it disappears from our passive memory, it either needs an anniversary or something dramatically stupid like Manu Sharma’s club-hopping and brawling or Rathore’s smirk for it to come back to centrestage. In both these cases, we remembered because of some determined help by the people in question. What did them in was the image they evoked rather than the substantive reality of their misdemeanor. Take Rathore’s case—had he been seen hobbling out of court helped by his wife while coughing incessantly, do you think we have would felt the outrage we did?
The trick then is to outride outrage. So many people have done that successfully—Rahul Mahajan, Indian cricketers tainted for match-fixing, Salman Khan, Fardeen Khan, Lalit Modi, and of course politicians of all hues. You can be arrested for drug busts, play with the emotions of an entire nation, run over people on a pavement and still hope to have a reality show of your own, if you understand the power of time well enough.
