It made an interesting contrast. On the day last week that British police foiled a terrorist plot to commit ‘‘mass murder on an unimaginable scale’’, judgement in the 1993 Bombay bombings was delayed yet again. As someone who believes that we will not win the war against terrorism until the Indian justice system is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, I saw the contrast as an example of why the West is winning its war and we are losing ours. This is not to say that there will never be another terrorist attack in London, New York or Madrid, what I am saying is that after 9/11 most Western countries realised that they were fighting a war and not a small group of lunatics. This realisation caused a change of tactics. They changed their intelligence and security systems, their laws, their attitude to groups that breed terrorism and tightened procedures in their already modern justice systems. There are no judges left in their justice systems who take three years to mull over their judgements or take hundreds of pages to put them in words.

The 1993 bombings in Mumbai were an act of ‘‘mass murder on an unimaginable scale’’, but the judge thought nothing of allowing the trial to drag on for eight years and then spending three years mulling over his judgement. One of the defence laywers, Majeed Memon, pointed out in a recent television programme that this was because there were 13 separate bombings to investigate and nearly a thousand witnesses to examine. There should have been more than one judge dealing with the case, he said. So, what prevented this happening? What prevented 13 judges being appointed to bring speedy justice in one of the worst crimes ever committed on Indian soil?

... contd.