BackWill others also get the ‘Uphaar’ the Ansals got?
An overburdened judicial system in India takes a long time to dispose of cases
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Growing old has its disadvantages but it also might get you out of a jail sentence. Two days ago, the Supreme Court exempted Gopal and Sushil Ansal—owners of Uphaar theatre where 59 people perished in a fire accident in 1997—from serving a jail sentence. Both have to pay a fine of ₹ 30 crore each in return. The reason which has been offered for exemption from imprisonment is age.
The judgment says, “We have noted the fact that as appellant no.1 is fairly aged, it may not be fruitful to ask him to undergo rigorous imprisonment." The younger brother, Gopal, has been let off on grounds of “parity". The Ansal brothers are aged 75 and 67 currently, so would have been 57 and 49 in 1997 when the accident took place.
But the Ansals are not the only aged people who would have gone to jail in India. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) provides data on prison inmates in the country. More than 53,000 people in the age group 50 and above were in prison at the end of 2013.
The number of aged people arrested every year is also not insignificant. According to the NCRB report, Crime in India 2014, more than 87000 people in the age-group 60 and above were arrested under the Indian Penal Code and Special Local Law crimes in 2014. Among them, more than 2100 were arrested under sections dealing with murder, attempt to murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder and attempt to commit culpable homicide.
An overburdened judicial system in India takes a long time to dispose of cases. According to the recently launched National Judicial Data Grid, around 11% of criminal cases have been pending for more than 10 years in India. The number jumps to 30% for criminal cases pending for more than 5 years. A recent NCRB report says that of the cases which saw completion of trial in 2014, around 13% took 5 years or more to do so. Then, the chances are that many undertrials in the 50-60 age group would add a decade or more to their lives before their cases are finally cleared.
Apart from inadequate judicial infrastructure, it is also noteworthy that delaying tactics by defendants is not new in high-profile criminal trials. An article published after the Ansal judgment has highlighted the delay in the 2011 AMRI Hospital fire case in Kolkata, and also the fact that most of those accused are fairly aged. Cases relating to communal riots have also been pending in courts for many years.
Supreme Court judgments can be cited as precedents in subsequent trials. Questions remain on whether this particular judgment would be upheld in the future. By allowing Ansals to escape imprisonment on grounds of age, the Supreme Court, even though unintentionally, might have created an avenue for resourceful offenders to derail justice, said Alok Prasanna Kumar, senior resident fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
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