1997: The turbulent year with Indian politics dwindling to find a leader. No one sure of where the political system would lead to...
And then we have
It has been more than a decade now. But the legal battle between the survivors of the victims and those at fault for the incident still lingers on. It has already seen two rounds of litigation with the case being presently decided on by the Additional Sessions Judge in
The facts are not really of essence here. The essence is that the credibility of the system is at stake. But then one is reminded of the deadly gas-tragedy which took place in 1984 in
But that is not essentially I am taking to emphasize upon. The thrust is that the victims of the tragedy have not yet been compensated after more than two decades of a settlement having reached and Union Carbide paid the Indian government for its alleged acts of negligence and mass torts.
Justice looks grim in this system. You can commit a crime and then be swayed away from the clutches of the legal system for decades [for example the decision of the Bombay blasts of 1994 having come out in 2007 with the procedure of appeals, revisions, reviews etc. still to have their role in the procedure] till finally a day would come, when the witnesses would have vanished [any one remembers Satyendra Dubey, a government engineer who exposed corruption in the national highway building program and then was killed mysteriously???], the victims and their survivors paid, intruded or persecuted [to remind oneself of the various stages the Jessica Lal murder trial has witnessed] and no one really interested, except the press ofcourse, of the outcome of the case.
The Supreme Court itself has more than 45,000 cases pending before it. What to speak of High Courts and then the trial courts and tribunals etc. There is no point really guessing when the outcome of a case would be out. It could be years, decades, or even more. I am a lawyer myself and in this short stint that I have laid my hands of briefs, I have already handled many which were filed even before I was born. Can't help the poor litigants really. You feel for them for some time and then you gradually take it on as a hard reality of the system and take that for granted.
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