On June 3 this year, Justice G Jayachandran of the Madras High Court penned one of the most strident indictments of India's justice delivery system in recent memory. The reason: an election petition filed by DMK neta M Appavu in 2016 shortly after losing to AIADMK’s I S Inbadurai by a slim margin of 49 votes from the Radhapuram assembly constituency in Tirunelveli district, got decided 10 years later, by which time the outcome was academic. It was not just that two assembly elections happened in between. It was that the Supreme Court ordered a stay on announcing the outcome of a recount of postal ballots in the case in 2019. It then sat on it for six long years before vacating the stay and remanding the matter back to the Madras high court. Curiously, the SC also let the question that was at the heart of the litigation go undecided: Do middle school headmasters qualify as gazetted officers to attest postal ballots?
Significantly, an SC bench extensively heard the matter on March 23, 2021 but inexplicably failed to wrap it up. One plausible explanation for leaving the core legal question on headmasters open could be that the bench that heard the arguments in 2021 had changed. As Chief Justice of India Surya Kant observed in a recent case, “The interval between the hearing and the pronouncement also affects the quality of the adjudication, as a judgment bears the imprint of the arguments that preceded it, and it reflects them most faithfully when it follows them closely.”
The Appavu verdict is not just a story about a disputed election, but a mirror held up to a system in which justice grinds so slowly that it often defeats its purpose. As per the National Judicial Data Grid, a whopping 49 lakh cases have been pending in high courts across the country for over 10 years. They constitute 10% of the pendency of all high court cases.
A decade for a 49-vote margin
The Appavu case reads like a slow burn thriller. After the May 2016 Tamil Nadu assembly election, the returning officer declared Inbadurai the winner by 49 votes. Appavu challenged it, alleging that 203 postal ballots, which were attested by headmasters of middle schools, had been wrongly rejected on the ground that "headmasters were not gazetted officers." He also alleged irregularities in the 19th, 20th and 21st rounds of counting of EVM votes.
The case went to Justice Jayachandran, who on September 24, 2019 reserved his order. A week later, on October 1, 2019, he delivered a categorical finding: the 203 postal ballots had been wrongly rejected as headmasters were indeed gazetted officers. Further, the judge ordered a postal ballot recount.
Inbadurai immediately approached the SC, which on October 4, 2019, let the counting proceed but stayed the declaration of result. What followed was a series of adjournments, part-heard listings, and indifferent orders that stretched till the third week of May this year. As Justice Jayachandran eventually observed, it was a "grave mockery of justice". (see graphic)
The SC apparently lost interest in the case after the assembly's term ended in 2021. By February 2023, the SC acknowledged the awkwardness of the situation, noting that "even the next elections are over" and that there were "better and more urgent matters" to hear. The case was listed for a future date. By the time it disposed of the case this year, two more assembly elections had been held - in 2021 and 2026. While lifting the stay on May 21 this year, the SC kept the legal question open on whether the attestation of postal ballots by headmasters was valid, and sent it back to the Madras high court "to pass appropriate consequential orders".
The matter went back to Justice Jayachandran, who recalled that he had in October 2019 determined that 203 of the contested postal votes were valid. Upon their recount the same year, Appavu had received 153 while Inbadurai had received just 1. In effect, Appavu had won the 2016 election by 103 votes (153-49) but the SC’s stay prevented its announcement. Eventually, the HC declared him the elected MLA for the 2016-2021 term on June 3 this year. The controversy may yet not be over as Inbadurai intends to go back to the SC with an appeal.
"The term unfortunate may not be an adequate expression to describe the present case," Justice Jayachandran wrote, "since in view of this Court, a grave mockery of justice, under the guise of dispensing justice, has been committed to the people of India, particularly the voters of Radhapuram Assembly Constituency, who were forced to bear a person as their Assembly representative though he is not duly elected."
Reserved verdicts
Though judicial delay is a perennial problem, the Jharkhand high court’s performance particularly gave the CJI cause for concern. He was appalled to find a bunch of writ petitions by convicted prisoners in Jharkhand who had already served over a decade in custody and were waiting for the verdicts reserved by the high court on their appeals for months, even years.
When the SC scratched the surface, it found that a Jharkhand division bench had heard 56 matters, including criminal appeals, between January 4, 2022 and December 16, 2024, without final pronouncement of the verdicts. When the high court learnt it was under scrutiny from the top court, verdicts in 75 long-pending cases were pronounced in just a week. Since the problem of sitting on reserved judgments for long periods was prevalent across the country, the CJI was forced to issue timelines for their expeditious disposal as also remedies for litigants in the event of a breach. "The pan-India scenario is deeply disquieting... "Each delayed judgment in that compilation represents a litigant whose case has been heard but whose fate hangs in the balance," CJI Surya Kant said.
Motor accident cases
Equally concerning is the delays in the resolution in motor accident cases. An SC bench comprising justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotishwar Singh recently observed that appeals under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 remain pending for an average of eight years in high courts and six years before Motor Accidents Claims Tribunals (MACTs).
The bench was disposing of a 25-year-old case of a homemaker killed in a road accident on November 25, 2001, owing to negligent driving of another vehicle near Sirsa in Haryana. The MACT awarded `2,42,000 in December 2003. Unhappy with the compensation, the family in 2004 moved the high court, which sat on the appeal for 20 years till December 2024. It’s in the judiciary’s own interest to expedite disposal of cases. As the CJI observed, quick pronouncement of verdicts is neither a procedural nicety nor a matter of administrative convenience. “It is the condition on which citizens’ confidence in the justice delivery system rests,” he emphasised.