Justice takes long, democracy pays the price

The death of Sajjan Kumar, convicted for his role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, is a grim reminder that justice delayed can indeed become justice denied. The riots followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Yet it took 34 years for the former Congress MP to receive his first life sentence from the Delhi High Court. He died on Thursday, aged 80, while serving that sentence – 42 years after the violence. The numbers are more damning than any rhetoric. The Nanavati Commission recorded 2,733 deaths in Delhi and 587 FIRs relating to the violence.

Around 240 cases were closed as “untraced”, about 250 ended in acquittals, and only 28 cases resulted in convictions, involving roughly 400 people. These figures should trouble every citizen, regardless of political allegiance or community. They do not merely expose the limitations of an individual investigation or trial; they expose the terrible human cost of a justice system in which time itself can become an ally of the accused. Witnesses disappear, memories fade, evidence is lost and victims grow old waiting for closure. Some die with out ever seeing the courtroom deliver its verdict.

But it would be unfair – and dangerous – to reduce this failure to the judiciary alone. Courts cannot convict without credible evidence, and criminal justice depends on the police investigation, prosecution, witness protection, forensic capacity and the timely presentation of cases. The 1984 experience, therefore, is a failure of the entire criminal justice chain, compounded by the vulnerability of institutions when the accused possess political influence. Yet the judiciary cannot escape scrutiny. India today has over 80,000 cases in its various high courts that have remained pending for over 30 years, while more than 10,000 cases in the Supreme Court have been pending for a decade or longer.

Also, over 30 percent of sanctioned high court judgeships were vacant as of July 2026. The remedy is neither to weaken judicial independence nor to impose arbitrary deadlines that could sacrifice due process. It is to strengthen the system relentlessly: fill judicial vacancies; establish professional case-management systems; expand forensic and prosecutorial capacity; protect witnesses; digitise records; restrict needless adjournments; create specialised courts for heinous crimes and mass-violence cases; and require institutional accountability for unexplained investigative delays. Justice must be independent, but it must also be timely.

A verdict delivered after the victims, witnesses and accused have largely passed into old age may satisfy procedure, but it cannot fully satisfy the deeper promise of justice. The lesson of 1984 is therefore not that the judiciary has failed democracy. It is that democracy cannot af ford a justice system that takes generations to deliver on its most basic promise: that no crime, however politi cally inconvenient, will be allowed to outlive the pursuit of truth.