Court Practices & Languages Alien To Traditional Societies; Justice System Needs To Be People Friendly : CJI NV Ramana Mehal Jain https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/court-practices-languages-alien-to-traditional-societies-justice-system-needs-to-be-people-friendly-cji-nv-ramana-182448 25 Sep 2021
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/cji-nv-ramana-odisha-indian-judiciary-executive-legislature-7533842/ Ramana reiterated his call for the Indianisation of the justice delivery system, emphasising the twin challenges faced by the Indian Judicial system, and said, “Even after 74 years of independence traditional and agrarian societies, which have been following customary ways of life, still feel hesitant to approach the courts. The practices, procedures, language and everything of our court feels alien to them. Between the complex language of the acts and the justice delivery, the common man seems to lose control over the fate of his grievance. Often in this trajectory, a justice seeker feels like I am an outsider to this system.”
CJI Ramana Wants ‘Indianisation’ of the Justice System. What Does That Entail? Shahrukh Alam https://thewire.in/law/indianisation-justice-system-nv-ramana-democracy-nation-state Oct 14, 2021
In the post-independence decades, ‘Indianisation’ has not signified any particular trajectory of change. Sometimes, it has coincided with the democratisation of public spaces, or increased access, or more transparency. At other times, however, it has meant quite the opposite: the crystallisation of the idea of a ‘strong nation state’, with fewer deliberations and debates. ‘Indianisation’ has also meant, for some, a conflation of the country with particularist religo-cultural representations.
Earlier this year, the government successfully made the argument before the Supreme Court that India is only a representational democracy, and not a participative one. In other words, that the extent of peoples’ participation is limited to electing representatives and then leaving the majority government alone to get on with the job. In this view of things, challenges to state policy, or state action, are seen as disruptive. If the ruling establishment gets particularly worked up, it can also label these challenges ‘anti-Indian’.
The CJI’s use of ‘Indianisation’ is a reference to the need for the ‘democratisation’ of justice delivery, as opposed to iterating a scheme, which has the state at its centre. He speaks of the ‘barriers [of style and language] for common people in approaching the justice delivery system’.
justice delivery unfolds within the prevalent social and political logic of the times. For the justice system to be democratised, the prevailing social and political logic must be democratic and not majoritarian. But this is not always the case.
‘the colonial origins of our criminal procedure code give much more power to the police than is given in other countries’. Meena Dhandha, professor of philosophy, had gently suggested that perhaps we need to think more about colonial laws and their trajectories in the post-colonial decades.
In India, a crowd of suspects is arrested, pending investigation. Most often, custodial remands are mechanically granted by the magistrate’s court, leading to the practice of filing bail application upon interim bail application by the pre-trial detainee. The practice of herding suspects into interrogation reflects colonial sensibilities towards natives; it could certainly do with change. However, I believe that it is these colonial attitudes towards both native-accused and native-police that have now segued into the post-colonial state.
Change perhaps should be imagined through frames of democratisation, and beyond the colonial-Indian binary. The aspirational, strong post-colonial state has at times imagined itself in the reflection of the colonial state thus collapsing that binary in the first place.