An Indian court recently sentenced a 90-year old man to life imprisonment for his involvement, along with nine accomplices, in shooting dead 10 people in a caste feud 42 years ago.
Ganga Dayal, who was also fined €620 by the district court in Faizabad, 350km southeast of New Delhi, was the only surviving member of the murderous upper-caste Yadava group that shot the low-caste Dalits in Sadhupur village in northern Uttar Pradesh state in December 1981.
His nine collaborators had died during a trial that lasted more than four decades.
Dayal, who was 48 when he participated in the killings, was unable to walk to court last month to hear judge Harvir Singh deliver his judgment, and was supported by two policemen on either side.
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He was then transported to the local jail to serve out his minimum 14-year sentence, which would make him 104 upon its completion.
Relatives of the victims who were present in court told reporters the judgment had no meaning for them, as it had come too late. Justice delayed, they said, was justice denied.
Government lawyer Rajeev Upadhyay told reporters that like the other nine accused, many prosecution and defence witnesses died during the extended proceedings, rendering the overall contours of the case “rather fuzzy”.
And in August 2022 a plaintiff was awarded €170 in damages by an Uttar Pradesh consumer court after 22 years for being charged 23 cents extra for two Indian Railways tickets he had bought in 1999.
“I attended more than 100 hearings in connection with the case,” Tughnath Chaturvedi said at the time, adding there was no price on the energy and time he had lost in the process.
These three random instances exemplify the interminable delays in India’s justice system, where the number of cases awaiting settlement currently stands at nearly 50 million, according to former law and justice minister Kiren Rijiju.
Of these, about 14.5 million were criminal lawsuits relating to murder, rape, armed robbery, theft, kidnapping and other violent crimes, of which over 420,000 had languished for more than a decade, while another five million had been pending for over three years.
Some 182,000 criminal and civil cases had been continuing in lower courts for 25-30 years.
Rijiju also revealed that more than 69,000 cases were as yet undecided in the supreme court, with nearly six million in the country’s 25 high courts – possibly the world’s highest number. A 2018 analysis by the government-run Niti Aayog public policy think tank estimated that it would take 324 years to clear India’s overall backlog of judicial cases.
A cross-section of lawyers and legal experts said these delays were due primarily to the enduring shortage of judges; in 2022, India had 14.2 judges per million of population, compared to 210 judges for the same number in Europe and 150 in the US.
Vacancies of more than 25 per cent in non-judicial staff positions and inadequate funding for courts and related departments by the federal government also adversely affected the delivery of justice.
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Other shortcomings included the failure to effectively contemporise antiquated colonial laws 76 years after independence, and most notably the abuse of legal procedures by lawyers who resorted to endless oral arguments and submission of impractical, overwritten pleadings which further delayed proceedings.
MA Rashid of Live Law, a legal newsletter, said “archaic”, time-consuming procedures in examining witnesses, and judges’ hand-writing of testimonies, despite advances in technology, perpetuated adjournments.
Appeals in high courts, he said, took five to 10 years to even be listed for final hearing, a situation that was duplicated in the supreme court. Hence, cases where convicts were acquitted after 20 or 30 years at the appellate stage were not uncommon, Rashid told the BBC.
Jurists said this meant about 76 per cent of all prisoners in Indian jails were awaiting trial at any time, a trend that compares unfavourably with the global average of about 34 per cent. They said it also indicated that three-quarters of prisoners were, in effect, serving extended punitive sentences without having been conclusively deemed guilty of their crimes.
Consequently, tens of thousands of under-trial prisoners languished for decades in overcrowded jails, many even dying before their final hearings were completed. According to the India Justice Report (IJR)-2022, the occupancy rate in Indian jails had, in most states, increased from 115 per cent in 2010 to 130.2 per cent in 2021.
However, in six states – New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring Uttarakhand; Madhya Pradesh in central India and Meghalaya and Sikkim in the northeast – this had soared to between 150 and 185 per cent, the non-government organisation stated.