The coordinated bomb blasts of 11/7 in Mumbai’s suburban trains, widely reported to have been engineered by Islamic extremists of the Lashkar-e-Toiba which claimed 198 lives and injured 700; and the abortive mid-August conspiracy in London to blow up ten airliners flying the Atlantic in connection with which 24 South Asian Muslims in the UK have been arrested, have devolved an urgent responsibility upon India’s Muslim intelligentsia and establishment to speak up against Islamic fundamentalism and initiate an overdue image makeover of Islam.

Although privately and publicly Muslim intellectuals and community leaders condemn perverted jehadi terrorism, there is a ubiquitous tendency to see the other side of the picture in terms of actual and perceived political and economic injustices inflicted upon Muslim communities in Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir etc. This lends a hollow ring to their condemnation of misguided terrorists who visit indiscriminate murder and mayhem upon innocent civilians in India and abroad. Unwittingly, such balanced appraisal and equivocation on the issue of terrorism by Muslim leaders plays into the hands of Hindu and Christian fundamentalists at home and abroad who seize upon it to condemn Islam and entire Muslim communities.

In this regard Muslim academics and business leaders in India with over half-a-century of experience of the power play and rules of democracy, have a unique opportunity to offer guidance and leadership to their co-religionists worldwide, provided they begin to assert their historically ordained leadership role within the 120 million strong Indian Muslim community. Regrettably thus far India’s secular Muslim establishment has been too diffident and has permitted the community’s leadership to pass to unqualified clerics and theologians whose worldly knowledge is restricted to rote recital of the holy Quran. The major consequence of the failure of the Muslim middle class to discharge its leadership role in Indian society is that the secular education of Indian Muslims has suffered grievously.

According to CERG Advisory, a Delhi-based economic advisory and corporate consultancy firm which has compiled path-breaking research analysis for India Today (August 14, 2006), on every measure of education attainment — basic literacy, urban literacy, school dropouts, graduates and women’s education — India’s Muslim community trails way behind national averages.

Surprisingly, despite the Muslim middle class having expanded considerably during the past two decades in particular — India’s highest net worth individual is a Muslim — and the Constitution encouraging the promotion and establishment of minority education institutions, Muslim-promoted schools and colleges offering secular contemporary education are conspicuously rare. This neglect of members of their own community languishing at the bottom of the social pyramid by India’s Muslim academics and business leaders who have left them to the tender mercies of madrassateachers and clerics, is the prime cause of rising Islamic fundamentalism in India. It’s a grave lacuna which India’s middle class Muslim establishment needs to urgently address. 

Clearing the horrendous legal logjam
The proposal advanced by chief justice of India, Y.K. Sabharwal to introduce a second shift to speed up case disposal in the country’s languishing judicial system has come not a day too soon and needs the support of the entire nation. Addressing the Supreme Court Bar Association on July 25, (like all his predecessors in office) the chief justice warned the complacent legal profession that “delay and huge arrears” in the country’s courts have shaken the faith of the people in the legal system which could be “crushed” under their weight.

Nobody who has had any experience of the nation’s archaic, shabby and cruel legal system (over half of the prison population of India comprises under-trial individuals too poor and ignorant to post bail) is likely to dispute the chief justice’s contention that the law’s delay is the defining characteristic of India’s moribund justice system. For the simple reason that access to the forums of justice through a sea of obsolete procedures, grasping lawyers to stand trial before ill-paid judges, is akin to a journey through Dante’s inferno.

It’s against this backdrop that Chief Justice Sabharwal’s proposal to run two shifts of the country’s laid-back courts which are in session for barely six hours per day and which close for six weeks every summer, assumes importance. This is perhaps the first innovative idea to surface from within the hidebound, conservative and traditional legal profession.

The major merit of the Sabharwal proposal is that it anticipates and squashes the standard response of the Central and state governments that they lack the financial resources to expand the judicial system by constructing more courts and courtrooms and expanding the judicial infrastructure in general. Under the chief justice’s proposal, cash-strapped governments won’t have to incur any additional capital expenditure. It sensibly proposes intensified use of the existing assets and infrastructure of the judicial system. The only incremental expense will be of revenue character — towards appointing additional judges and support staff until the backlog is cleared. And to clear the legal logjam which has brought the justice system into public disrepute, the chief justice has proposed the re-appointment of experienced retired judges and senior lawyers of integrity and ability at all levels of the judiciary while simultaneously inducting alternative modes of disputes resolution.

Unfortunately Chief Justice Sabharwal’s shift system proposal has not received the attention it deserves within government, the media and public. Although the nation’s myopic politicians and bureaucrats seem unaware, the law’s excruciating delay — over 24 million cases are pending in the courts — imposes a heavy toll upon the economy. It prompts the rise of parallel forums of mafia justice (Naxalites, Shiv Sena etc), and it slows down the economy by hampering the enforceability of contracts. This is too heavy a price for civic society to continue to pay indefinitely. That’s why the chief justice’s double shift proposal to clear the horrendous legal logjam deserves the active support of all right-thinking people.