Courts must deal only with justice and leave equity to government
Recently the Supreme Court of India, yes, the Supreme Court no less, overturned a judgment of the Delhi High Court allowing bike taxis in Delhi. Bike taxis are motorcycles that ferry passengers for a fee. Whatever the legal, administrative and regulatory pros and cons of the case, we need to pause and ask why should such a trivial matter become a concern for the Supreme Court. Many people might quite legitimately ask if the Honourable Court doesn’t have more important matters to attend to. Indeed, there are many such instances where a citizen would be perfectly justified in asking the same question.
The Supreme Court is often seized of matters that should be settled at the high courts’ or even the lower courts’ level. As the astronauts of Apollo 13 said, we have a problem. And this problem has two dimensions. One is in the right to appeal, which is nearly limitless in our constitutional scheme. Indeed, it’s nearly a fundamental right. The other is the courts’ liberal policy of admittance. The totally unintended result is exploited by two classes of persons — the lawyers who get paid and the litigants who can afford them.
But there’s nothing that can be done about this except by the Supreme Court itself. Here also there are two problems. One is the interchangeable way in which the terms justice and equity are used. The job of the Court is to ensure justice while equity is left to governments because justice is a legal concept while equity is a political one. The second problem is that while in many other countries the Supreme Courts deal only with constitutional matters, in India the Court ends up admitting even a case about bike taxis. As a result, the Supreme Court is dealing with a major case backlog. According to the Supreme Court’s website, as on June 1 the number of pending matters was 68,745, of which Constitution bench matters are just 433, of which 43 are main matters and 390 are connected matters.
And this is because all of the above ideas have become intertwined so that the classical idea of a Supreme Court deciding mostly on constitutional issues has become blurred. Finally, there is the matter of written submissions in place of lawyers verbally arguing cases. In today’s context, the latter is a waste of the Court’s time and must be given up except in the rarest of cases. That said, the problem of case backlog impacts all courts. Former Law Minister Kiren Rijiju informed the Rajya Sabha this February that there were a staggering 59 lakh pending cases before the 25 high courts. According to a September 2021 paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, while the average rate of disposal of cases by the high courts between 2015 and 2019 was about 1.8 million cases per year, the number disposed of in most years is lower than those admitted. The delays impact constitutional matters, criminal cases and economic disputes. It explains India’s poor contract enforcement record.
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