"If they go to High Court, I'll go all the way up to Supreme Court. I have financial strength. Even if I die, my son would fight the case." said the angry old man.
He said that when I tried to work out a compromise between two warring parties in a civil dispute. I'm no lawyer, but believe that older people can live a lot happier if they don't have to deal with the courts or the governments. The parties involved were highly educated, held high offices in the government or private sectors.
This gives one of the many reasons for the cases piling up in our courts. Unlike a village Panchyat that has a responsibility and an interest towards resolving local issues, our courts are the creations of coloniality. They are often disconnected from the ground realities. The farther the courts are from the locations of dispute, the more disconnected they are. To be fair to the system, in this specific case, the local court simply ordered the two parties to come to a compromise, left it to lawyers to work out the details.
To work out a compromise, the mediator must be independent. But lawyers by design are paid by the clients and so end up obeying them. So, no progress was made and the case moves to the next stage on its way to become one in the crores of pending cases.
There is a clear absence of mediating personalities in our current social setup. In cases where lawyers play the role, one party is wiser to buy peace for a monetary value. Nothing wrong with that. When the object of the dispute is not wealth, the role of lawyers is reduced. That is where a social setup like Panchayat played a role. The Panchayat was definitely for the people, of the people, and by the people. It has its share problems, but the biggest problem is their loss of respect. Part of it was due to its own conduct and the rest was due to our constitutional judiciary.
This loss of respect for Panchayat is well reflected in our movies.
In Devar Magan (1992), when a dispute is discussed, Periya Thevar wants the Panchayat to be called. He was a man from the previous era who believes in resolution by a local body than justice. The next generation goes to the court and fights it out. In another famous comedy scene from a movie released in 2003, the Panchyat is ridiculed with the son character played by Vivek asking his father if he has studied law or was at least an apprentice to a lawyer. (He then shoots the accused at his private part.)
The constitutional legal system declared itself supreme by declaring the Panchayats rulings have no legal validity in 2010 even if the community accepts its decisions. Destruction of a distributed system for dispute resolution, disconnected people with no-skin-in-game given the responsibility to provide justice, and general corruption of values have made a mess.
It is our misplaced stress on justice instead of dispute resolution that has given such authority to our legal system. Most of our people would accept a verdict even if it is not favorable to them but comes from a respected authority. The question now is, are our judges respected? Why do cases move up the courts and why there are appeals on judgments?
