‘Justice delayed is Justice denied’ is the old phenomenon in India. It has become the characteristic of Indian legal system now. It takes so many years to start even a trail in the lower court and takes many more years to reach the final Judgment.

Justice delayed is of course Justice denied but what if the justice denied to anybody for 54 long years? What can we say about such kind of judicial process? According to some media reports, Machang Lalung, a tribal from Silchang in Morigaon district of central Assam, was kept under custody for more than fifty years without a single trial and forgotten.

According to the report, Lalung was a 23-year-old youth in 1951. The police arrested him for a minor crime and sent him to jail. He never faced a trial in the connection with his case. He was lodged in jail for almost 54 years. He was initially in police custody but police later sent him at the Tezpur Mental hospital.

He was released on bail for Rs. one in July 2005 at the age of seventy-seven, following the intervention of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). He started enjoying the family life in his village near Tezpur but died in 2007.

The Indian Express reported that according to the single available record in Guwahati Jail, he was booked under Section 326 of the Indian Penal Code, a non-bailable offence for ‘voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means’. The maximum penalty under this section is ten years in jail.

Before death, Lalung had even forgotten the case and the reason why the police had detained him way back in 1951. He said:

I don’t remember why I was taken to jail.

After living in an asylum for so long, he spent last days of his life with his niece Sadhna Pator. Aneisha Sharma later made a 23-minute film ‘Freedom at the Edge’ on Lalung’s life and the movie earned rave reviews at the Boston International Film Festival this year. Aneisha said:

It was a strange life that our system forced upon this innocent man.

This is a major question why did justice come to the 80-year-old justice after 54 long years and who is responsible for the delay? According to a data, there is a backlog of more than 40,000 civil and criminal cases in the Supreme Court. It has increased by 25 percent in last one year.

Still, the apex court is in no mood to set up its bench anywhere in the country. H.R. Bhardwaj, the minister for Law and Justice, once told MPs in Lok Sabha that till Jan 31, 2007, a total of 40,243 civil and criminal cases were pending in the apex court.

Is India’s judicial system working well?

Image: IBNLive