New Delhi: The Allahabad High Court on 26 August upheld the conviction of a man who was accused of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old and mutilating her private parts in 1988.
The judgment came over 30 years after the convict, Ishrat, had filed an appeal in the court against a trial court verdict that found him guilty of offences under Section 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons) and Section 354 (assault or criminal force on a woman with intent to outrage her modesty).
In November 1988, the child, who had reportedly gone to a neighbour’s house to play, was brought back with blood-soaked clothes. In October 1992, the Kanpur district and sessions court found Ishrat guilty of attempting to rape. He filed his appeal in the same year but had to wait for over 30 years for the case to be decided.
The trial court had given him two separate jail sentences — three years of rigorous imprisonment under Section 324 and two years under Section 354.
The Allahabad HC last month cancelled his bail bonds and ordered his arrest, saying he must serve the rest of his sentence. In its judgment, a single-judge bench of Justice Krishan Pahal said that the crime was one of the “most serious and diabolic offence committed against a minor girl of [the] tender age of four years” and that the crime was committed with extreme sadism and lust.
Justice Pahal also admonished the state for not having appealed what it said was a short sentence in proportion to the crime.
“It is a very sorry state of affairs that the state has not preferred any appeal against the leniency observed… The lethargy of the public prosecutor is highly deplorable,” the court said, adding that considering the facts of the case, the accused in the case did not deserve any leniency.
What’s significant about the judgment is that it highlights Allahabad High Court’s long backlog of cases — a fact that the Supreme Court has highlighted on several occasions.
Data from the National Judicial Data Grid shows that the Allahabad High Court currently has 10,32,746 cases pending. Of these, over 4,70,000 cases are pending criminal appeals and 10.2 per cent of these are over 20 years old.
Justice Govind Mathur, a former Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, told ThePrint that such delays were caused by several factors — the most significant among those being judicial vacancies.
“Admittedly, the pendency in the Allahabad High Court is too much,” he told ThePrint. “This is due to multiple reasons — including counsels seeking adjournments, lack of trial court records, and the vacancy of judges. Against sanctioned strength in the court of 160, only 95-110 judges remain on the bench at any point in time.”
The government, he said, must look to filling such vacancies to increase disposal rates.
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Pending for decades
Ishrat’s case is by no means singular. In May this year, a Supreme Court Bench of Justice L. Nageswara Rao and B.R. Gavai expressed alarm after it was told that criminal appeals from the 1980s are still pending in the Allahabad HC.
“That means 42 years. The trial would have taken four to five years. So the person who has committed an offence in the 1970s, at the age of 30-40 years, would be 80-90 years now,” Justice Rao had said, highlighting a variety of reasons for the current state of affairs — including judicial vacancies.
Asking Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to help suggest solutions, the Bench said such judicial delays affect the right to speedy trial, guaranteed under Article 21 (Right to Life) of the Constitution.
“The Allahabad HC is a volume-driven court,” senior Advocate Manish Tiwari, who practises at the court, told ThePrint. “The volume of cases that come to the HC is one of the highest. [in the country].”
Attempts to reform have so far failed to resolve the problem, he said
“There are systems in place to dispose of cases. Hit-and-trial methods have been employed to increase rates of disposal, which has sometimes been counterproductive, leading to higher pendency,” Tiwari said.
Justice Mathur said the solution was regular benches for the disposal of cases.
“Regular benches for disposal must be established. We tried to do this during my tenure, and this must be taken forward,” he said.
‘Grant bail’
Taking note of the high number of criminal appeals pending before the Allahabad HC, the Supreme Court suggested in February 2022 that convicts serving more than 14 years should either be granted bail or be considered for remission.
In that case, the court, while granting bail to 12 convicts who had already been in jail for 14 years, laid down broad parameters for bail.
In another case in March, the Supreme Court had called the high pendency of criminal appeals before the Allahabad HC and the Lucknow Bench a “disturbing state of affairs”. The court was hearing an appeal against the high court’s order refusing to grant bail to an accused who had already been in jail for 12 years.
Despite this, data shows, though, that the Allahabad High Court is one of four HCs — the others being Odisha, Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh — that have seen their backlog of cases decrease between 2010 and 2020.
Indian courts have a growing backlog of cases and a large number of judicial vacancies, data shows. In September 2021, over 4.5 crore cases were pending with our courts.
Almost 9 out of 10 such cases are pending at the level of subordinate courts, while one out of 10 is in high courts.
High courts that serve a larger population have higher pendency, with a few notable exceptions. For instance, Patna and Calcutta courts have lower pendency compared to the HCs of Madras, Rajasthan, and Punjab, despite serving a higher population.
Akshat Jain is a student of the National Law University, Delhi, and an intern with ThePrint.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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