SC’s adjournment edict: a benchmark or an exception?
There was this famous dialogue in the 1993 B o l l y wo o d f i l m ‘Damini’, where an angry lawyer Sunny Deol questions the court on the unlimited adjournments given on the request of a prominent lawyer, played by Ambrish Puri. The dialogue went like this, “tarikh par tarikh milti rahi hain par insaaf nahi mila (one has only got adjournments from court but not justice).”
Something similar happened in the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court of India, last week. The difference was that this time it was an angry judge questioning the lawyer seeking adjournment. A junior lawyer seeking adjournment on behalf of his senior told the bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud that he was unaware of the case and had no instructions to argue the matter.
Taking exception, the bench said, “We are under instructions to hear the case from the Constitution. Please call the advocate on record. Ask him to appear before us.” An advocate on record is a lawyer who is authorised to represent clients and file cases in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court later slapped a fine of Rs 2000 as costs on the said advocate on record for sending an “unprepared” junior to court in his place for seeking adjournment. The question is, will the action taken by the Chief Justice be a benchmark for not allowing adjournments, which singularly delays justice, or the remarks will have a shelf life of just few days or may be a few months? If one were to revisit Sunny Deol’s full dialogue in the film, he is stating what is known to everyone associated with the judicial system —judge, lawyer or litigant. For the connoisseurs of English literature, the wait for justice for victims concurs with the plot of the famous play ‘Waiting for Godot’.
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who penned the play, wove a plot in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Beckett’s absurdist drama is thus about two vagabonds anticipating a mysterious saviour. In the Marxian interpretation, Godot stands for God. To them, Godot is a weakened or diminutive form of the word God. The characters of the play wait for him so that he may deliver them from their miserable existence. Delivery of justice in the Indian courts, to use Beckettian lingo, could be like Godot which never arrives.
This is best captured in a dialogue in the 2013 Bollywood flick ‘Jolly LLB’, where the judge in a scene tells a novice lawyer, reading his affidavit, “Prosecution’ ko ‘Prostitution’ likh rakha hai aapne, ‘Appeal’ ko ‘Apple’(You have written prosecution as prostitution and appeal as apple)!” The dialogue writer through the spelling errors has managed to depict the irony gripping the Indian justice delivery system. The poor litig a n t s b e i n g Vladimir and Estragon, who wait endlessly in the hope of justice being delivered someday. Taking this further, critic Vivian Mercier says the play “has achieved a theoretical impossibility – a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats.”
True as above, the Indian litigant remains glued to her or his trust in the delivery of justice despite the sloth in the system. This trust is captured in a dialogue in the sequel to ‘Jolly LLB’, where the judge says, “Aaj bhi Hindustan me jab kahi do logon ki beech jhagda hota hai, koi vivaad hota hai, toh ek dusre se kya kehte hue paaye jatein hain (even today in India when there is a conflict between two people over an issue, what do they say) … I Will See You In Court.”
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice