The Law'S Delay
A full seven years after the securities scam broke, the judicial system has handed down the first verdict on a criminal case involving Harshad Mehta, the kingpin of the scam. The CBI, which is investigating the scam, has filed 26 criminal cases involving Mehta and 60 odd cases in all. Of these only around half a dozen have been decided so far, with four involving Hiten Dalal and now one involving Mehta. It is anybody's guess how long the system will take to go through the rest of the cases.
Slow as the progress has been so far, even this may come to a total standstill after November when Justice Rane, who has just delivered the verdict involving Maruti Udyog funds, retires. His successor is yet to be appointed. There is provision for three special courts but only one is now functioning. It would have helped matters greatly if an incoming judge could work for a time with an outgoing judge so as to familiarise himself with the highly technical matter. The chief justice of the Bombay high court apparently does not want to release any judge for the special court until at least some of the many vacancies there are filled and the present law minister Ram Jethmalani apparently has not been very helpful in the matter. Appointments to various high courts have been held up under successive Congress regimes, beginning with Indira Gandhi's. But vacancies remain a problem despite change of governments and backlog of cases continues to exist.
The Supreme Court has recently ordered that a criminal case should be disposed of within three years of firming up of charges. The new rule should certainly be made applicable to the special court trying the scam cases. Justice Variava, who was manning the court till he became chief justice of Delhi high court, had felt that the need for the judge himself to record evidence was what delayed matters.
It is difficult enough for the investigating agency to successfully launch proceedings against white collar crime. If the judicial process thereafter takes inordinately long, despite the creation of a special court to speed up things, then when will the whole matter end? As investigators usually bring their best cases first, the chances of the CBI securing conviction as the process goes on will diminish. Most depressingly, this is not the end of the matter. The accused will surely move the Supreme Court in appeal. How long the appeal will take to get disposed of no one is sure. What is worse than all this delay in securing justice is the fact that no one in authority seems worried about it.
The conviction itself establishes what Harshad Mehta was known to have done. He subverted the banking and commercial system to garner funds. He used these funds to play the stock market and make a pile for himself, at the cost of the ordinary investor. If the scam had not broken and he had operated for some more time, he would have paid off all his dues. At whose expense? Then the indices would have climbed higher, unsupported by fundamentals, and the crash thereafter would have been greater.