if something is not done by a determined and concerted effort immediately, the whole system might collapse. There is an immediate need for a massive de-criminalisation for auxiliary adjudicative services and a systemic assurance against the violation of human rights in the investigation of crimes. The affront to human dignity in the process has been enormous. Citizenry has become hostile, belligerent, distrustful and alienated. Incivility and insolence of power towards law-abiding citizens has irretrievably eroded the confidence of people in the system. But, despite all the harshness of the investigation machinery, the results are poor. Not even 10 to 15 per cent of the prosecutions for heinous offences succeed. There are excellent, tried and proven systems for changing the face of the criminal justice system. It is amazing as to why and how those in authority turn their faces away from such available technology for improvement in the investigation and prosecution of crimes. The administration of criminal justice in the adversarial mould depends entirely on evidence, and quite often on oral evidence of witnesses. Today, witnesses are intimidated, suborned, bribed and won over. The result is for all to see. There needs to be an increasing dependence on scientific evidence through modern forensic science techniques. A massive build-up of modern forensic science facilities, intensive training for investigators, prosecutors and judicial personnel is absolutely necessary. It must be realised that an unjust acquittal is much a miscarriage of justice as an unjust conviction. It is not the severity of punishment but the certainty of punishment that deters crime. No amount of economic development or desired social change is ever possible or enduring without an efficient criminal justice system. This is the importance of inter-institutional-complimentarities. An inefficient criminal justice system is the worst negation of the Rule of Law.
Need for Good Governance, Moral Integrity and Standards in Public Life
The most important element in the Rule of Law is good governance. Good governance in a sense means that all public power and public wealth are used only for public good. In the last few years of this decade, the Central Government's expenditure rose from Rs. 92,808 crores to Rs. 2,68,107 crores. The deficit in 1948-49 budget was Rs. one crore. In 1997-98 it was Rs. 86,345 crores. This increasing expenditure is a serious problem. In a study of legal institutions in Asian Economic Development entitled, The Role of Law, there is a reference to the proliferation of court cases in which government is a party. The study says that, “The extensive delegation of lawmaking authority to the executive has resulted in a proliferation of rule making at all levels. The major
check on the legality of these rules has been the judiciary, and citizens have made ample use of this institution. Sample studies on the outcome of cases, in which the State is a party, suggest that the non-State parties have a high chance of winning such cases. In appeal cases against the tax administration, the courts reversed agency adjudication in 95 per cent of all cases. In land administration, the courts reversed agency adjudication in 95 per cent of all cases. In land matters, non-state parties win in 60 to 65 per cent of the cases, and in other matters the success rate may even be higher. These numbers are very high by comparative standards. They may be seen either as evidence of the independence of Indian courts of the low level of compliance with the law by state bureaucrats”'.
The World Development Report, 1997 on ‘The State in a Challenging World’ says, "The clamour for greater government effectiveness has reached crisis proportions in many developing countries where the State has failed to deliver even such fundamental public goods as property rights, roads, and basic health and education. There a vicious circle has taken hold: people and businesses respond to deteriorating public services by avoiding taxation, which leads to further deterioration in services. Matching the State’s role with its capability is the first element in this strategy. Where state capability is weak, how the State intervenes - and where - should be carefully assessed. Many States try to do too much with few resources and little capability, and often do more harm than good. A sharper focus on the fundamentals would improve effectiveness. But here it is a matter not just of choosing what to do and what not to do - but of how to do it as well. But capability is not destiny. Therefore, the second element of the strategy is to raise state capability by reinvigorating public institutions. This means designing effective rules and restraints, to check arbitrary state actions and combat entrenched corruption”.
Need for Checking Corruption in Public Life
There is again the problem of venality of offices and corruption in public life. Herman Finer in “The Theory and Practice of Modern Government” refers to the amusing instances of patronage of public offices in the old days in France. He said, “All public offices were a species of private property, and a voluminous jurisprudence governed their transmission. This jurisprudence is at pains to explain that the offices which were vendible and hereditable were of a two-fold nature: they were at once a property and a public function”. “Ability, however, unsupported by money or family, was almost certain of exclusion from public office. The system, in short, was venality by tempered favoritism”. Finer spoke of how public offices were bought and sold with frantic frenzy:
Prices rose, but there was a frantic buying. Ministers made the most of their financial discovery. As it soon became too difficult to invent new offices, the old ones were doubled or trebled - that is, divided up among several holders, who exercise their functions in rotation, or who did what the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were too fond of doing, employed a humble subordinate to carry them out.
Offices were sought, then, with a frenzied energy, and they were created with cynicism. Desmarets, one of Louis XIV s Comptroller-Generals, had proposed to the King the establishment of some quite futile offices, and the latter asked who would ever consent to buy such situation. “Your Majesty”, replied Desmarets, “is forgetting one of the most splendid of the prerogatives of the Kings of France - that when the King creates a job, God immediately creates an idiot to buy it”.
Let us skip making any comparisons here in relation to our own system. HOPE FOR AN EFFECTIVE REMEDY
What then is the remedy? The problems of this country are too enormous, too complicated to be amenable to simplistic solutions. Cybernetics requires that complexity of the problem must be matched equally by the complexity of the solutions. But the one golden thread that runs through all the process of Indian self-renewal is the restoration of the culture of the inner man and respect for the old-world conviction that without a moral perception of means and ends intellect is a self- stultifying instrument and that the scornful impatience of the egoist surely wrecks a mission.
Almost 77 years ago, Chakravarty Rajagopalachari wrote this when he was serving a political sentence in the Vellore Jail:
We all ought to know that Swaraj will not at once or, I think, even for a time to come, be better government or greater happiness for the people. Elections and their corruptions, injustice, and the power and tyranny of wealth, and inefficiency of administration, will make a hell of life as soon as freedom is given to us.
Hope lies only in universal education by which right conduct, fear of good, and love, will be developed among the citizens from childhood. It is only if we succeed in this that Swaraj will mean happiness. Otherwise it will mean the grinding injustices and tyranny of wealth. What a beautiful world it would be, if everybody were just and God-fearing and realised and happiness of loving other! Yet, there is more practical hope for the ultimate consummation of the ideal in India than elsewhere.