FOR SALMAN KHURSHID, IT IS A BIG CHALLENGE AHEAD; AND I PERSONALLY LOOK FORWARD TO A REVOLUTIONARY COUPLE OF YEARS AHEAD!

As a media house, from the very beginning, we have been extremely vocal about the Indian judiciary – and that’s why we have also started our bimonthly supplement of Governance Watch with a special focus on the judiciary. We strongly believe that a poor justice delivery mechanism has been the root cause of most of our problems. It goes without saying that India has a weak, or rather a limping justice delivery system, which makes sure that justice is denied in most cases; and even if delivered, it does not hold any value, thanks to the time (read lifetime) it takes to be delivered. By the Centre’s own admission, there is a staggering number of nearly three crore court cases pending at several stages in different courts of India. This situation is a deliberate creation of our successive governments. If criminals were to be punished, how would they rule? Thus, to make the rule of criminals easy, the governments in India over the years have deliberately kept the judicial system in our country dysfunctional. It serves the purpose of the legal fraternity as well. Thanks to the years or decades that it takes to execute a case and to take it to its culmination, the legal fraternity invariably ends up making a windfall profit. And thanks to the absence of a time-bound justice delivery mechanism, making moolah is not at all a challenge for our legal fraternity, as they are quite adept at purposefully making cases hang on for years. The only thing that we nowadays talk about is corruption. And the one and only solution for solving this issue of corruption is a functional judicial system. Corruption and greed are globally prevalent; yet these touch far less lives in the USA than in India simply because the American judicial system is functional while ours is dysfunctional. In America, they have ten times more judges per million people than in India; so there is a fear of immediate punishment – while in India, there is no such fear of punishment.
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