Our judicial system is a farce, thrust upon us by the British: Former Madras High Court judge, Justice PN Prakash [Part I]

Justice PN Prakash served as a judge of the Madras High Court for nearly a decade before retiring in January this year..Before being elevated as a judge, he worked as a lawyer, specialising in criminal law for 30 years. And before that, he was actively involved in politics, affilated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for a time..While on the Bench, Justice Prakash was instrumental in bringing into force the Tamil Nadu Criminal Rules of Practice, 2019, in winding up the evening courts in Tamil Nadu, which he realised were an unnecessary burden on the State's resources, and in introducing the Pattam Project, a rehabilitation system for first-time petty offenders. He disposed of 69,190 cases during his tenure as a judge.Justice Prakash was known across the Bar and the Bench for his integrity, self-discipline and fearlessness. And it these qualitites that prompt him to point out the flaws in our judicial system, which he goes on to call a "farce.".In the first of this two-part interview, he speaks to Bar & Bench’s Ayesha Arvind on his journey to judgeship, the lack of truth in the justice system we inherited from the British and the solutions he has in mind to help fix the system.Edited excerpts follow..Ayesha Arvind (AA): When did you decide to become a lawyer?.Justice PN Prakash (Justice Prakash): I wanted to become a doctor actually. But in 1977, Indira Gandhi called for elections and all exams were postponed by more than a month. The results also came late. So, by the time my Class XI CBSE results were declared, most medical college seats had already been filled. So, I joined the DG Vaishnav College in Chennai to study economics.I was also good at theatre and used to participate in plays. Around that time, I got acquainted with the famous actor Radha Ravi. He told me to come join the Law College. He said they did a lot of plays at the Law College and that I could act in them. So, I joined law college to become an actor.I finished studying law in 1984. At the time, there was a lot of post-Emergency activism. I was very fascinated by all that. That is what attracted me to the BJP also. All these people with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leanings got together. Justice MC Chagla (former Cabinet Minister and Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court) was there. We were all great fans of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. So, I joined the BJP. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement started and we became part of it. I was an ordinary party worker, but used to do a lot of public speaking. At that time, I was arrested and kept in the Chennai Central Jail.Then I got married. My daughter was born. And I realised I had no money. My brother and my father were taking care of my family. I now had some responsibilities and realised that if you keep doing party work, there is no money to be made. You want money, go to courts. So, I decided this time to get back to serious practice. .AA: How were your early years at the Madras Bar?.Justice Prakash: One cannot establish one’s practice overnight. I was aware of this. I used to take the 7C bus every day to the Madras High Court. Call it destiny, fate, or use any other word, but what happened was that the famous Public Prosecutor, P Rajamanickam, who used to live two streets behind mine, noticed me waiting at the bus stop every morning. He was the Chief Public Prosecutor in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case and was much respected because of his integrity. He got one of the Intelligence Bureau men to check my background and report to him.One fine day, he called me and asked if I would like to work with him. He said he was very busy with the Rajiv Gandhi case and that I will have to take up all of his other cases. All the money that was supposed to go to him would come to me, he said. I just grabbed the opportunity..Rajamanickam’s reputation in the High Court was phenomenal. He was like Napoleon. He commanded that kind of fear and respect. Everyone knew he was an authority in law. The judges would get unsettled the moment he entered their courts. So, I became his shadow. He was a taskmaster. All he cared about was the court and the law. So, I had to discontinue all my political work. I felt like I underwent a rigorous military-like training in law under Mr Rajamanickam. I was learning law directly from a legal giant. He got me made Additional Public Prosecutor in two years. Together, the two of us were a deadly combination. On his death, the government made me Public Prosecutor. So, I inherited it in a way.Then, around 2004, a stage came where I said no more government work. We (Justice Prakash, Justice G Jayachandran, and Advocate S Rajendra Kumar) started a firm called Norton and Grant. That was my phase of making money. I decided, however, never to appear in NDPS cases to ensure I never misused all that I had learnt from the other side as a prosecutor..AA: How did judgeship happen?.Justice Prakash: I hadn’t really planned on it. I had become Public Prosecutor and I thought next, I’ll make a mark as a lawyer, maybe become the Advocate General. In 2006, Jayachandran (sitting Madras High Court Judge, Justice G Jayachandran) cracked the district judiciary examination and became a district judge. Rajendra and I were left at the firm to manage everything on our own.Then, in 2013, Justices KN Basha and T Sudanthiram retired. The senior-most judges of the Madras High Court thought a vacuum had been created on the criminal side, and therefore, called me asking if I consented to being elevated to the Bench. I told them my name will not be cleared due to my past political leanings.I declared everything, including my political past in the form, because I did not want to conceal anything. Also, I didn’t get arrested for cheating or in a murder case. I didn’t need to hide anything. It was a political arrest. .But after my name was proposed by the Madras High Court for elevation, there was so much agitation by the Bar. They said I was a Brahmin candidate and that I was a Malayali, therefore, not a son of the soil. Which was not even true. I was born in a government hospital in Triplicane, Chennai. But even then, I did not harbour any ill-will against anyone. I knew everyone had political motives. I understood their political compulsions. And then, to my surprise, the Congress government cleared my name. The Home Ministry called for my files. The High Court and the Supreme Court Collegium cleared my name as I had not concealed anything about my political past..AA: You said once that the whole judicial system is bogus. Do you still stand by that?.Our judicial system did not have an organic growth with the society. It was thrust upon us by the British.Justice PN Prakash.Justice Prakash: Calling it bogus is harsh. You can use the word ‘farce.’ Our judicial system did not have an organic growth with the society. It was thrust upon us by the British. The Greeks believe in one life and linearity of time. This thought went to Rome and from there, the jurisprudence of the West was shaped. For them, since there is only one life, justice should be delivered immediately. We Indians believe in several lives, and also in the theory of Karma. For us, time is cyclical and that is why we suffer injustices stoically. We accept boycott of courts by lawyers and also long delays in the disposal of cases. We attribute all this to our Karma. Our people respect the courts more out of fear than love..There are two classes of people in India - those who cannot be persuaded to litigate and those who cannot be restrained from litigating. The former is in the majority. Since this formal justice dispensation system has not had an organic growth, our people do not hesitate in speaking lies. There is an instance quoted in CD Field’s Law of Evidence: A man filed a suit based on a forged pronote and the defendant resisted it with a forged acquittance! If an in-depth study of the plaints and written statements filed in suits is conducted, you will see that both sides would have lied copiously. Truth and justice are twin sisters. And in the absence of truth in the system, what we are delivering is not justice, but merely judgements. Our former President KR Narayanan said once during the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Supreme Court that the court of law "is not a cathedral but a casino where so much depends upon the throw of the dice." Let me tell you that I strongly believe in our scriptures, especially the Bhagwath Puran, where in speaking about the Kalyug, Sukhacharya tells Parikshit, “Might only will be right. There will be injustice because of immorality of judges.”It also says, "Justice will have every chance of being vitiated because of one's ability to gratify those administering it, and voluble speech the (only) criterion of scholarship."Aren't you seeing some so-called Senior Advocates loudly arguing irrelevant points? .It is the rich who create a traffic jam on the road to justice. Please visit the prisons. You will see the lowest strata of the society suffering imprisonment either as remand prisoners or convicts. Why? Do you mean that the middle class and upper class people in this country are paragons of virtue? No, they are able to break laws and the system with influence and money power.The Judicial Statistics Bill that Fali S Nariman had sought to introduce in 2004 was a very good idea. It would have let one know about the kind of disputes a court hears, the amount of time it spends on each case etc.Today, a petty dispute comes to a court. For instance, say a man comes with a promissory note claiming his neighbour borrowed money but won't return it now. The lawyers and the court spend time on examining if the signature on the note is indeed the neighbour's. It is sent to the forensic lab and ultimately, the matter goes all the way upto the Supreme Court. And everyone has made money along the way. The litigant might have ended up spending more on the legal fees than the principal amount that he claimed to have lent to his neighbour.So, where is the time to render justice? We are so far from the truth. Even in pleadings, how much truth is there?Please read Arun Shourie’s Anita gets bail and Justice Mridula Bhatkar’s I must say this. You will get tears in your eyes..AA: What would an ideal system be, according to you?.Justice Prakash: We cannot romanticise our past and try to turn the clock back. We should have a Commission of Inquiry to study perjury and falsehood in courts.Let me share an experience. Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee constituted a special bench headed by myself and Justice Abdul Quddhose to study the motor claims original petition (MCOP) jurisdiction. To our shock, we found that lakhs and lakhs of rupees available in various courts lay unclaimed. Several times, we detected staff siphoning these amounts. All this money should have been paid to the poor claimants.You know why people still go to court? Because, in their collective imagination, judges occupy an exalted position. Ideally, a robust alternative dispute redressal system where disputes can be nipped in the bud by mediation and conciliation will work best.Currently, people go to mediation because the judiciary is incapable to render justice in a timely manner.