Mumbai: Major Manjit Rajain had to skip a day of work every month for nine years over a case against him which was eventually dismissed as a clerical error.
After he retired from the army and opened his first business, the Registrar of Companies filed a suit against him for misrepresenting himself because his army files showed his surname to be Rajan, without the i, and he had written his surname Rajain, with an i on the forms to register his company.
Major Rajain explained how trivial the error was.
Even though the former soldier showed the court his passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, and several other documents to prove there was an ‘i’ in his last name, the case against him was not dismissed for nine years.
“The good thing that came out of it,” Major Rajain says “was that I made friends with many major businessmen sitting outside the courtroom, because they had all been dragged there for equally trivial reasons.
“This country’s progress depends on a strong judicial system which can provide quick justice in commercial matters,” says Dushyant Dave, a senior advocate in the supreme court, who has seen the judicial system deteriorate since he began practicing in 1978.
“We need foreign investment to improve technology and capital. If we’re not able to protect technology in terms of intellectual property rights, and if we’re going to drag investors into our court system for several decades, then they’re not going to come.
“We have more than 700 million people living in poverty, and this is the greatest challenge of our democracy. The judiciary has a great role to play. Unfortunately I don’t think the judiciary really realises that.”
The legal logjam has led to overcrowded prisons, with more than 68% of the prison population still under trial. Some prisons are over two or three times over capacity.
Getting bail usually depends on the quality of a defendant’s lawyers. Alok Prasanna, an analyst from a think tank called Vidhi Legal Policy says.
“In criminal trials, the process itself is a punishment. Many under trial prisoners end up doing their entire sentence without getting a full trial.”
The result of these never ending cases has led to a crisis of faith in the legal system. Two-thirds of ongoing cases are criminal rather than civil cases, which suggests that India’s judicial system more than six decades after independence is not much different from the one inherited from the British raj, where rulers used the legal system as a means of maintaining order and criminalising agitators, whilst the majority of civil disputes were settled outside courts. Prasanna explains.
“Parties don’t see litigation as a way to resolve disputes so much as get what they want by making the other party suffer and come to court repeatedly for years.
“I always tell people who approach me for legal advice not to go through the courts,” he says, “because you may win or lose the case, but you will definitely lose both your money and your sanity”
