India has have never had a general as defence minister. Apart from the odd minister of state, no career diplomat has ever been a foreign minister. In fact, the more successful ones like Swaran Singh, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh never held any diplomatic positions abroad. Jagjiwan Ram and C. Subramaniam did well as agriculture ministers, but neither had any experience in tilling land.

Most of the successful heads of ministries have been non-specialists. George Fernandes made a good railway minister and the only previous connection he had with the department was from the other side of the fence, as a trade unionist. Madhavrao Scindia, too, did a reasonable job while handling this portfolio and he had no family background in this field except for an ancestor who had a toy train built to carry curries from the kitchen to hisbanquet table!

No pilot has headed the civil aviation ministry. Finance is the only field where a case could be made for an expert to handle the job because of the complicated procedure involved in passing the budget. But here, too, of the four better known ministers in recent times only Manmohan Singh came from the economics field. Yashwant Sinha is from the administrative service, Chidambaram is a lawyer.

A specialist should not become the constitutional head of any department because then he would lose objectivity and perspective. Sir Ivor Jennings summed up his views on the subject in his authoritative work Cabinet Government: ``The minister is not an expert, nor can he ever hope to compete with his advisors on their subjects. His task is to bring an independent mind to questions put before him ... narrow departmental experience is a disadvantage.''

The proof of Sir Ivor's contention lies in the abysmal state of our judicial system. No other facet of the state activity has remained as stagnant asthe judicial system. In every other field reforms and institutional changes have taken place regularly. But the legal system has remained, by and large, unchanged for at least half a century. In fact, some of the procedures date back to Queen Victoria's time. The same routine of petitions, notices, evidence, arguments, appeals...

Which is why it takes us seven years to get the first conviction in the securities scam case -- still several appeals away from the final sentencing -- while in a similar situation that arose much later in Singapore (Barings Bank case) the accused has been tried, sentenced and he has even served out his prison term. Which is why a political leader who was caught red-handed with over three crore rupees in his puja room struts around defiantly on the political stage. And which is why the culprits of the 1984 riots will never be caught because the 15 years is too long a time to test the memory and the spirit of the witnesses.

The primary reason for this sorry state is that nonon-lawyer has ever been the law minister. The legal luminaries who headed this department were loath to change the rules by which we administer justice in this country. Anyone who spends a lifetime in any system, and does well in it professionally, develops a vested interest in its perpetuation. He prefers to stick to precedents. And legal people are notorious for writing Precedent with a capital P.

On the other hand, if we have a lay law minister he will not be a prisoner of the old mindset. He will still have, as in other fields, experts to advise him on technicalities. There is a battery of them at the minister's disposal. Apart from the departmental officers, the advocate general and the solicitor-general, even outside counsel can be engaged. In fact, when Justice Ramaswamy's impeachment was discussed in the Lok Sabha, the lawyer law minister, a `specialist', was not considered fit enough to present the government's viewpoint and some outside expert had to be brought in.

A lay person with fresh ideasmay find a way of ensuring that we get some justice from our judicial system.

Mohan is a freelance journalist