Justice delayed is good: Ask Vajpayee, Advani and Congress

The Supreme Court on March 31 issued a notice to BJP veteran Lal Krishna Advani, asking him why he along with 19 others should not be tried for criminal conspiracy in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

On March 30, Advani was at Rashtrapati Bhavan where he, watched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other top BJP leaders, received the Padma Vibhushan for his "exemplary service to the nation". The honour to Advani followed the Bharat Ratna conferred just days earlier on his mentor and the first NDA prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who, a day before the demolition, had exhorted Hindu karsevaks in Ayodhya to "clear the ground" for a grand Ram temple.

22 years is a long time in politics, long enough to turn criminals into statesmen and nation's heroes. And the only reason it has been allowed to be so is our dead-slow judicial process.

Consider another recent verdict. Almost 28 years after a group of Provincial Armed Constabulary men massacred 42 Muslims in cold blood at Hashimpura in Meerut, the court did not find any of the 16 men guilty of the crime for lack of evidence. In other words, the court said nobody killed those men.

Or 1984. Senior Congress leaders accused of leading mobs that killed thousands of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere still enjoy clout - and even positions in Parliament - because the law has not been able to catch with them. The political commentators have often cited the lack of judicial infrastructure as the main reason for India's dismal record in delivery of justice. We have just 15 judges per million people, a far cry from the 50 judges per million population recommended by the Law Commission in 2008. The average percentage of cases pending trial in state high courts and lower courts has increased to 84.81 per cent in 2013 compared with 82.8 per cent a decade earlier. In fact, estimates say that it will take 320 years to clear the backlog of 31.28 million cases pending in various courts of law across the country.

But that is only one side of the story. What has consistently been seen, especially in cases involving high-profile politicians, is a lack of political will to ensure the guilty are tried on the altar of justice. There seems to be a consensus among India's political class to go easy on cases against their peers.

And then there is always the mother of all strategies: time. Survivors of a tragedy die; their perpetrators age or sometimes even die gracefully, unblemished by the taint of a judicial reprimand.

It is time that makes Vajpayee, the founder of mainstream Hindutva along with Advani in the 1980s, the nation's latest statesman. It is time that has ensured a convenient forgetting of Advani's Rath Yatras in the 1990s, called "chariots of fire" by a magazine for the trail of deaths and destruction it left behind.

It is time that has made a marginalised Hindutva fashionable and cool today, with its modern avatars - Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Mohan Bhagwat et al - occupying prime constitutional and cultural real estate at the Centre as well as the popular imagination.

It is this time that justice must account for if it considers itself the custodian of India's Constitution.