The Justice League

Listening to Sam Pitroda’s plans for India’s future reminded me of Marie Stopes explaining the menstrual cycle to Indian village women...

For all that he brackets himself with Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai as one of the creators of modern India, Sam Pitroda, “Mr Technology”, the telecom prophet come out of the West, will have a tough time galvanising West Bengal’s creaking judiciary. I hope he succeeds.
But listening to his plans for India’s future reminded me of Marie Stopes, the British scientist and campaigner for birth control, explaining the menstrual cycle to Indian village women and giving them strings of beads to count the days.

To her surprise, the village was bustling with babies on her next visit. Instead of calculating the safe period on the beads, the women had hung them outside their houses as a charm against conception.
I met Pitroda before he outraged orthodoxy by announcing there was no inconsistency in a Gandhian wearing jeans and swilling scotch. I can’t remember about the scotch nearly 30 years later but his jeans, high-heeled boots, flowing grey mane, goatee and American twang cut a flamboyant figure when Pupul Jayakar, then called the czarina of culture, invited us to dinner. There was a messianic fervour about him then.
Pitroda still bubbled with enthusiasm when we met last week at another dinner party, this time at the home of Kolkata businessman, Harsh Neotia. The American twang is barely audible. He is also more realistic about the challenge. When my wife mentioned food being taken out of the PDS and sold in the market — the rightful recipients being fobbed off with the lie that it hadn’t arrived — he replied with an even more grim tale. Medicines are stolen and poor patients injected with water!
I particularly liked Pitroda’s division of society into Brahmins and Sudras. Sudras execute the strategy and plans Brahmins draw up. It chimed in with my experience of asking an architect the width of a window. He ordered his clerk to fetch a tape measure who in turn ordered a mistri. I was not allowed to touch the tape when it arrived. The foreman was summoned for the measuring.
Kipling wrote in Kim of India’s “mixture of old-world piety and modern progress”. Magnificent flashes of science and technology — some of it Pitroda’s own handiwork — prove society isn’t still mired in ignorance and superstition as in Stopes’ time. But much of the progress has passed by the 400 million people languishing below the poverty line who are Pitroda’s special concern, as he repeatedly told Neotia’s dinner guests. West Bengal accounts for 37 million of the poorest of India’s poor.
They will benefit from Pitroda’s plans to establish connectivity at the grassroots so that the infrastructure can be developed and food banks and healthcare systems established. But if it does take off — and I hope it will — the e-governance he has in mind for West Bengal’s judiciary will mark a national first. Pitroda and his young Bengali colleague, Suhaan C. Mukerji, an advocate with a Delhi law firm, are working on a system of video conferencing to enable undertrial prisoners to face justice without stirring from their cells. High court judges will directly monitor subordinate courts. Cases will be assigned to judges who are not overburdened with work. Judgments will be sent for as soon as they are issued. The advocate-general and other senior law officers will plead before the Supreme Court via video conferencing.
Modern technology is full of marvels, but as I tried to explain to Mukerji, who went to my old school, the human element is often more powerful than systemic innovations. West Bengal is the graveyard of ideas. I have seen rain harvesting troughs without a drop of rainwater, pits to generate gobar gas used to dump rubbish. A fine dairy and farm at Haringhata has disappeared. So have nurseries to grow avocados and mulberry.
The judiciary is our most static institution. It doesn’t believe in movement. My family has had a rent case pending in a district court for more than 20 years. My mother filed it long before she died in 1994. I have been waiting for three years for the Calcutta high court registrar to sign a simple probate application. Apparently, his head clerk hasn’t yet put it up.
When my family won a property suit in the same high court and the judge’s peon, resplendent in scarlet and gold, rushed up to demand baksheesh, my lawyer observed at the top of his voice, “In another few years, the Hakim Sahib himself will come down to demand his tip!”
I was invited recently to speak on judicial and media reform in the high court precincts. The audience burst into applause when I recounted that tale, after describing my district court and registrar experiences. But the Chief Justice and senior legal luminaries on the platform maintained a stony silence. That didn’t surprise me. I did, however, expect some inquiry into the complaints. There was none.
A last — true — story from the judiciary. Younger Kolkata advocates once decided on terminological modernisation and sent a delegation to inform the Chief Justice. Reaching his chamber, they knocked and asked, “May we have your Lordship’s permission to enter?” Permission granted, the leader cleared his throat and recited, “May it please your Lordship, the Bar Council has decided that addressing your Lordship as ‘Your Lordship’ is not in keeping with the spirit of the age. It belongs to the British Raj. We will, therefore, address your Lordship in future as ‘Your Honour’ or ‘Mr Chief Justice’”. May we have your Lordship’s permission to withdraw?”
Permission granted, they returned to the Bar Association. The Chief Justice remains his Lordship.
I would truly like to see Pitroda and Mukerji shake up the moribund system.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist, columnist and author

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