Giving the rousing cry of “Awake, Arise! Oh Partha!” from the Bhagavad Gita to exhort trial court judges to rally against the “virus of adjournments”, the Supreme Court has lashed out at litigants for delaying court proceedings when the haunting spectre of pendency looms large over the judiciary.
A Bench of Justices Misra and Rohinton F. Nariman said every adjournment and every attempt to delay court proceedings amounted to a “colossal insult to justice.” The apex court cautioned “indulgent” trial court judges from granting adjournments at the “drop of a hat.”
The Bench was giving its judgment in the case of a Karnataka-based litigant, Gayathri, who was engaged in a civil dispute with a senior citizen of over 70 years. The Bench found that this litigant had chronically sought adjournments over a period of almost seven years, citing one or the other reason, causing great stress and mental agony to the septuagenarian.
Even the examination-in-chief of the senior citizen was delayed by over three years, between 2009 and 2012, due to the continuous adjournments sought by the litigant in question. The excuses for delay over the three years in question ranged from her lawyer’s mother’s illness to a wedding in the lawyer’s family to the lawyer himself being sick or out-of-station or busy in another court. All this had caused the senior citizen to walk to and back from court.
The Bench said it found the case a typical example showcasing the “maladroit efforts of a litigant to indulge in abuse of the process of court.” “The defendant-petitioner [Gayathri] has endeavoured very hard to master the art of adjournment and on occasions, having been successful, become quite ambitious. The difficulties faced by an old man when he is compelled to come to court so many times to give evidence can be well imagined,” Justice Misra wrote in the judgment for the Bench.
Ms. Gayathri had approached the Supreme Court after the Karnataka High Court upheld the lower court judge’s decision in February 2016 to grant her no further time to cross-examine and ordered her to pay Rs. 1,000 in costs.
Justice Misra’s judgment does not spare Ms. Gayathri’s lawyer too. It observed that a “counsel appearing for a litigant has to have institutional responsibility.”
Noting the frequency of applications filed for adjournments in the lower court, the Bench pointed to the lawyer in question that “the law does not countenance it and, if we permit ourselves to say so, the professional ethics decry such practice. It is because such acts are against the majesty of law.”
The court expressed its disappointment at how “misplaced sympathy and indulgence” of judges compound the malady of delay in court proceedings, especially in civil disputes, which could extend for decades and span across the lives of successive generations in a litigating family.
Thus, declining Ms. Gayathri’s challenge against paying Rs. 1,000 in costs, the Supreme Court ordered her to pay Rs. 50,000 in costs to the Karnataka Legal Services Authority. The amount has to be deposited in the trial court within eight weeks or she would lose her right to examine her defence witnesses.
