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| Judging business | | Justice delayed is justice denied |
| Business Standard / New Delhi Jan 12, 2010, 00:02 IST |
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It is now over a year since the founder-chairman of Satyam, Mr Ramalinga Raju, was picked up for questioning after he virtually confessed to corporate fraud. For 12 months now, Mr Raju has been in judicial custody and police lock-up as an undertrial. To this day, it is still not clear how long the investigations will take and when the trial will begin. How long will Mr Raju be denied bail? An equally ignominious corporate fraud was perpetrated by the founder of the Galleon group, Raj Rajaratnam, in the United States and the accused is out on bail. More to the point, the US district court judge, who is handling the case, has even fixed a date, March 26, for pronouncing the verdict. Surely one cannot make much of a muchness about the plight of high-profile undertrials in India when there are literally thousands of lesser mortals languishing in judicial custody and police lock-up with no certainty about how long their ordeal will last. While the slowness of the investigation and prosecution system is one side of the blemished face of the Indian justice delivery system, the slow pace of functioning of the judiciary is another. Cases drag on and, increasingly, courts either seek to pass the buck from one level to another, or from one bench to another.
Both the government and the judiciary must make a distinction between ordinary civil and criminal cases, and even corporate fraud, on the one hand, and corporate disputes, on the other, that have financial implications for thousands of shareholders and investors. Delayed justice in the latter case hurts not just the parties to a dispute but all those invested in them, the shareholders and the stakeholders. Consider the legal dispute between Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited and Anil Ambani’s Reliance Natural Resources Limited. The case has dragged on with a judge even recusing himself for one reason or another. What is surprising, however, is that even the highest bench of the highest judiciary is taking its own time to take a view. A three-member bench of the Supreme Court, headed by the Chief Justice of India (CJI), chose last month to reserve its verdict. When the bench reconvenes this month, it must take a view rather than delay its judgement or pass the buck.
Speedy completion of high-profile cases has the positive externality of reinforcing public confidence in the judicial system. While it is true that most ordinary litigants reconcile themselves to inordinate delays in the judicial process, interminable high-profile cases add to public cynicism and weaken public trust in the judicial system. There is, moreover, a fundamental difference between a case heard at lower levels of the judiciary and one heard at the highest levels. When the CJI presides over a bench, that bench’s conduct and efficiency define the parameters by which lower courts and lesser officials judge their own conduct and efficiency. The CJI and his colleagues do know that justice delayed can tantamount to justice denied.
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