Make us terrorists? Was March 12, 1993, a rehearsal? This from a man who fled with every other Memon in his extended family to Dubai just before the bombs went off. This from a man whose brother Tiger is charged with being the main conspirator, this from a man who has been found guilty of financing the evil enterprise. And he dares to talk like this in an Indian court?

Something has to be very seriously wrong. It is. Everything about the justice system needs to change, starting with the urgent need to clean up our courts and restore their dignity. Many of our courts are housed in buildings so fine they should be protected monuments. But enter them and you see paan-stained walls, smelly corridors in which stray dogs and cats wander, and courtrooms that look as if they have not been cleaned since the British left.

If justice has to be associated with the word “majesty” then the minimum requirement is a clean courtroom.

Let us now discuss the sort of outdated procedures that cause trials to drag out over decades. In the Mumbai bomb blasts case 123 suspects were tried.

A large number, but did we need a case file that was 40,000 pages long, 15,000 pages of charge sheets, 3,000 pages of submissions and 14,000 pages of evidence?

The short answer is: No.

Then, there is the peculiarly Indian practice of judges writing detailed judgments instead of explaining as briefly as possible why they have found someone guilty or not.

... contd.