‘The Broken Legal System We Inherited Has Remained Broken’: Justice Muralidhar on India’s Judiciary at 2047

IN 1833, WILLIAM BENTINCK’s government admitted that India’s criminal justice reforms had failed to achieve “the twin objects of a court viz., cheap and quick decision of cases.” Nearly two centuries later, Justice S. Muralidhar told an audience gathered for the 28th D.S. Borker Memorial Lecture, the situation remains unchanged. 

The 28th D S Borker Memorial Lecture, was delivered on August 24 this year by senior advocate and former Orissa High Court Chief Justice Justice S. Muralidhar and chaired by Senior Advocate Indira Jaising in the memory of the distinguished civil servant D.S. Borker. Justice Muralidhar in his lecture focused on the visions of the Indian legal system for 2047 with a particular focus on the judiciary and judicial administration.

‘The broken legal system that we inherited has remained broken’

Over 5.1 crore cases in the district judiciary, 65 lakh in the High Court and nearly 93,000 in the Supreme Court, Justice Muralidhar said, remain pending. However, he pushed back on the narrative that judges alone are to blame. 

“To state the obvious, we do not have enough judges,” he said while urging the need to acknowledge the work being done by the existing judicial workforce that is clearly overworked. 

Among Justice Murlidhar’s sharpest criticisms was the collegium system and what he described as unexplained executive interference in appointments over the past twelve years, compounded by a lack of transparency in criteria. 

“The disclosure by the Supreme Court during Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s tenure as Chief Justice of India of the criteria called the Performance Appraisal Template for evaluating candidates for appointment both to the HC and the SC is only a half-way house to transparency. We still need to know whether the candidates found eligible satisfied the criteria. We owe that disclosure to the people of this country. They must have the confidence that only the best among those available are being appointed to the HCs and the SC,” he said, adding “One wishes this happens much before 2047.” 

‘Judges alone are not responsible for the delays in disposal of cases’

“It is too simplistic to think that by merely appointing more judges the existing pendency of cases can be effectively tackled,” Justice Muralidhar said explaining that there are many cases among the 5.5 crores in the formal legal system that are actually dead cases; where the parties are not alive, the subject matter does not exist, the law has changed, or the government’s position on the issue has changed irreversibly. He proposed a concrete, near-term solution of  deploying young law graduates, researchers, and retired judicial officers to comb through court records and weed out cases that are effectively dead. 

This exercise, he said, could realistically be completed within five years, making the docket by 2047 “much more manageable,” and dismissed the oft-repeated claim that India’s backlog would take 300 years to clear.

He also informed that the mental fatigue of judges is seldom acknowledged or accounted for within the system as judges are also bogged down by non-judicial administrative tasks. “It is of course a myth that outside of court working hours judges have a jolly good time. Most of the judges, and at all levels, are working beyond court hours attending to administrative tasks: examining building plans for new court rooms, purchasing computers and furniture, choosing uniforms for staff, examining complaints against judges in the district judiciary and deciding on whether to order an enquiry, fixing the menu for the next grand event being hosted by the court; preparing for lectures to deliver at judicial academies, “ he said. 

Who else contributes to the delay in disposal of cases?’

First and foremost, the State, informed Justice Murlidhar. “By their actions of taking arbitrary decisions, or not deciding at all, or by unthinkingly criminalising normal activities in a democracy like peaceful protests and unnecessary arrests, governments drive people to courts,” he said. 

Second, both government counsel and private lawyers.