‘It’s like Groundhog day’: Decades of waiting for justice in India’s overburdened court system
Frustration and exhaustion crept into Sanjay Goel’s voice as he stared at the pile of handwritten court documents in front of him.
He was on one of his many trips from Vancouver to Mumbai, India, to fight for justice in the brutal murder of his mother and was struggling to explain the surprising delays in the criminal court proceedings.
“It’s beyond my understanding,” Goel, 61, told CBC News.
“The files disappeared. The files were found months later.”
His mother, Dr. Asha Goel, a Canadian citizen, was visiting her family in Mumbai when she was severely beaten and killed in 2003 in an incident allegedly ordered by her two brothers.
His children initially thought that the criminal case would be open and closed. They got a confession from one of the alleged hitmen, and strong genetic evidence that the match was one in 10 billion.
But even all that evidence couldn’t make it into India’s overburdened justice system, where more than 54 million cases, both criminal and civil, are pending.
Goel, his sisters and his elderly father are waiting for a decision after hundreds of courts and hearings, some witnesses have died and others are too old or too disabled to testify.
“It’s like Pig Day,” Goel said. “A judge must overrule or rule more than once on the same dispute.”
Many lawyers and judges forced to examine India’s antiquated judicial system suffer from a similar sense of hopelessness.
The ‘memorial’ backlog
“There is hopelessness,” said Gautam Patel, a recently retired judge of the Bombay High Court.
The backlog “has become so big, I think we’re in a state of panic.”
The numbers are staggering, even in a country of 1.4 billion.
Finally, more than 54 million cases are pending nationwide, according to the National Judicial Data Grid.
The backlog has doubled in the past decade, with more than 5.5 million cases that have dragged on for more than 10 years.
At the beginning of 2023, the oldest pending case in the country, the bank closure case filed in November 1948, was dismissed for very serious reasons – no one showed up for the last scheduled hearing.
The rate at which new cases are filed in Indian courts is beyond the power of the bench to decide. At the current pace, experts say it will take several centuries to clear the docks completely – and many believe that solving the cases quickly does not seem to be a priority.
“No serious effort has been made to try to deal with the backlog,” retired Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur said during an interview at his home in Delhi.
The situation is so bad that at the time the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India, Tirath Singh Thakur, broke down and appeared to be on the verge of tears when he spoke to the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, about what he called the “mess” of cases, as he urged the government to hire more judges to deal with the backlog.
That was in 2016, when the number of pending cases stood at 27 million – half of the current backlog.
The government is India’s biggest litigant, involved in almost half of the cases in the system.
Successive governments have promised to deal with this ongoing issue, but little is being done to the country’s huge problem of ongoing crimes.
‘When will all these problems end?’
Mumbai activist Sudhir Dhawale is familiar with the pain of waiting for judgment.
He spent 6½ years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement, awaiting bail.
Dhawale was arrested in June 2018 on charges of inciting ethnic violence, under India’s most controversial Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), an anti-terrorism law criticized for its vague definitions of crimes and strict bail conditions.
“In prison … all people do is wait and wait,” he said. “When will this all end? No one knows.”
Dhawale, who has spent years exposing casteism in India, says the charges against him are shocking.
“The indictment is 25,000 pages long. There are more than 350 witnesses,” he told CBC News, adding that prosecutors don’t seem to know how to frame the charges against him and the 15 other academics and activists arrested at the same time.
When he was granted bail, a judge at the Bombay High Court ruled that Dhawale had been “inordinately delayed” in violation of his fundamental right to a speedy trial.
Almost a year after his release, he is still awaiting a trial date.
The processes behind the backlog
A key issue that increases the backlog is that India’s judicial system, inherited from the British, is inflexible and has archaic procedures that rely heavily on oral arguments from lawyers, who then issue lengthy written submissions that tread the same ground.
India’s Supreme Court announced in December that by 2026, it would limit oral arguments to 15 minutes, the first attempt to impose a time limit, but Lokur said lawyers “have to be on board” for the limits to work.
Witness testimony is often handwritten and difficult to decipher. Court stenographers have to transcribe them all, slowing down the process further.
India is also plagued by a shortage of judges, with an average of 15 judges for every one million Indians, according to data compiled by the India Justice Report, a non-profit organization. In Canada, federal and provincial court data show that there are about 65 judges per million.
Lokur, a retired Supreme Court judge, said vacancies are around 40 percent in India’s highest court and 20 percent in lower courts.
“Recommendations [for judge appointments] they are not done on time,” he says, and even if they are done eventually, “the gaps are not closed.
Another important issue, according to a seasoned judge who serves as the chairman of the United Nations Internal Justice Council, is cases that should not end up in the courts, such as bouncing a check due to lack of money.
In Canada, there is a fine for bank charges, but in India, check forgery is a criminal offense that can land the person who wrote the check in jail for up to two years.
“There are hundreds of thousands of such cases pending,” Lokur said. “Once there were almost a thousand cases [of bounced cheques] will be installed in one day in Delhi.”
Bail applications are also exploding, said Patel, a former judge of the Bombay High Court.
“There are high courts in this country with 300 new bail applications per day,” he said. “That’s a crazy number.”
Indian courts are struggling under a huge backlog of cases that will take centuries to clear. CBC’s South Asia spokesperson, Saliah Shivji, explains how the crisis got so bad and hears from people who have been waiting decades for justice.
Patel told CBC News that it’s difficult to start addressing problems with India’s justice system because the old systems are so entrenched, recalling for example one case that landed on his desk.
“When it came to me, 17 judges had decided the same question of law in the same way,” he said.
“I had 18 in a row and they were still saying the same thing they did on Day 1. What a huge waste of time.”
It’s a loss of productivity as well. A study from legal think tank DAKSH estimates lost wages and business from attending court proceedings at around 0.5 percent of India’s GDP.
Patel said a possible solution is to outsource some of the court’s administrative duties to administrative professionals.
He’s also been dabbling with productive artificial intelligence, in the form of a new program called Adalat AI, which he said “saves a lot of time.”
It transcribes court proceedings in real time and in several languages, eliminating the work of stenographers. The system is slowly spreading and the company says it is being used in more than 2,000 district courts in eight Indian states.
When Patel heard about it, his reaction was simple.
“Where have you been all my life?”
‘I try my best’
But for Sanjay Goel, the steps taken to deal with India’s overburdened courts do not change his reality – that justice has not been done, it is “officially buried.”
He said he feels lucky that he and his family can continue to fight to see his mother’s killers in prison.
“I’m trying my best,” he told CBC News. “But it’s worrying.”
He is disappointed that Canadian government officials “washed their hands of the matter,” he said, even though his mother has lived and worked as an obstetrician in Canada for forty years and his brother, who is wanted by Indian police in connection with the murder, is also a Canadian citizen now living in the Toronto area.
But mostly, it pains him to think about his father, who is a widow and alone at the age of 88.
“It’s hard to look at him. I was saying, father, I did what was expected,” said Goel with tears in his eyes and his voice trembling.
“I made a promise and I need to fulfill that promise, to the best of my ability.”
