CJI Gogoi shuns leniency, puts premium on court time, unveils procedural reforms

Last month, petitions on three headline-grabbing political controversies — Ayodhya land dispute, Rafale fighter deal and sending the CBI director on leave — were heard by benches headed by CJI Ranjan Gogoi, who dealt each with clinical precision and passed interim orders within a few minutes, putting a very high premium on the court’s time.

A battery of renowned lawyers appeared for the parties in each case, eager to put across their arguments. But the CJI-led bench ruthlessly squeezed out the verbosity, passed orders and proceeded to the next case.

CJI Gogoi’s approach contrasts with that of his predecessor, who got bogged down by unsavoury events early in his tenure as CJI, became wary of antagonising lawyers and allowed them to advance full-length arguments even during preliminary hearings on appeals and PILs.

The ‘no leniency’ signal emerging from the CJI’s courtroom is ominous for lawyers. Prepare well, be crisp and state your best argument as soon as possible appears to be the new mantra, reminding one of former American president Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was once congratulated for a trademark, pithy speech and asked about the time he took to prepare them. He had said, “It depends. If I am to speak for 10 minutes, I need a week for its preparation; if 15 minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

Most lawyers who used to be ready to argue a case at short notice may now have to labour a lot more over the case and cull out the best points to be put across to the CJI-led bench in the shortest possible time. Then and only then could they possibly drive home their argument.

Last week, the CJI conservatively opened a window to his thought process while declaring that “judiciary is in dire need of drastic reforms”. From the little he revealed, it appeared that he has measured his time as the head of the judiciary, which is at best 375 more days, and would focus on procedural reforms to unclog the three-tier justice delivery system, burdened by a load of three crore pending cases.

First and foremost, he appears serious in filling 5,000 posts of judicial officers lying vacant in trial courts, which have a sanctioned strength of a little over 22,0000 posts. He has warned high courts and state governments, through judicial orders, to fill the posts in a time-bound manner and provide each judicial officer with required infrastructure.

Long pending cases, a decision on which by the SC will help HCs dispose of a large number of pending cases, are being given priority. The CJI has set up a ‘think tank’, comprising professionals, to cull out the logic employed by benches in reaching decisions in important, yet generally voluminous, judgments for circulation among the masses to make them aware of how judges draw conclusions in landmark cases.

But, the most impressive procedural reform, revealed by the CJI, is to make available copies of judgements to litigants in their mother tongues if the verdicts written in English were intelligible to them. When this thought emerges out of drawing boards, where it is at present, it would prove the best connect between highest judicial institution and the masses.

The other impressive character of the CJI Gogoi’s thought process to usher in procedural reforms is his belief that there must be some continuity in the thread of judicial administration that emerges from the SC and percolates down to lowest judiciary. He said he is devising the methods to accelerate the tired justice delivery system in active consultation with his two successors - Justices S A Bobde and N V Ramana.

But gender equality in selection of judges to the SC and high courts is one aspect on which he has not throw any light on. With the appointment of four new judges to the SC on Friday, the total number of judges in the SC till date since January 26, 1950, rose to 237, of which 28 are serving. Of these, three are women and five more have retired. That takes the total number to eight. This means just 3.4% of the total number of SC judges till date have been women.

India got its first woman SC judge in Fathima Beevi (1989-1992), who was followed by Sujata V Manohar (1994-1999), Ruma Pal (2000-2006), Gyan Sudha Mishra (2010-2014), Ranjana P Desai (2011-2014), and three sitting SC judges R Banumathi (2014-present), Indu Malhotra (2018-present) and Indira Banerjee (2018-present).

In this, there is similarity between the Indian SC and the US Supreme Court, which in its 228 years of existence with a maximum strength of nine has produced 113 judges. Only four were women, or just 3.5% of the total number. The first woman judge was Sandra Day O’Connor (1981-2006), followed by Ruth Badr Ginsburg (1993-present), Sonia Sotomayor (2009-present) and Elena Kagan (2010-present).

Like in India, there are very few in the US who put their money on a woman lawyer when it comes to a criminal trial involving toughies, who need to be cross-examined, or trust them to argue matters involving constitutional issues. Four years ago, while speaking at Georgetown University, Justice Ginsburg had epitomised her gender equality stance when asked when she would think there were enough women judges in the US SC.

“My answer is when there are nine (she meant all nine US SC judges),” she said. When eyebrows were raised, her response was equally impressive, “There have been nine men, and nobody questioned that.”

CJI Gogoi may not agree with having an SC with all 31 judges being women, but surely, their numbers in the SC and HCs need a boost.