By IANS
New Delhi : On a day Bihar witnessed yet another incident of a mob lynching an accused, President Pratibha Patil said the “agonizing delay” in delivering justice tempts the common man to take the law into his own hands and “subscribe to the deviant culture of the lynch mob”.
Patil, inaugurating a seminar on judicial reforms here, said the foremost problem to be tackled by the judiciary is the huge swell in the volume of litigation.
“Congestion in courts has become a daunting challenge. Case disposals are excruciatingly time consuming. This agonizing delay has rendered the common man’s knock on the doors of justice a frustrating experience.
“This has ominous portents. We cannot allow a situation where the common man is tempted to take the law into his own hands and subscribe to the deviant culture of the lynch mob,” Patil said at the seminar organized by the Confederation of Indian Bar.
The president asked the bar and the bench to address the problem. “The formal adjudicatory machinery has to reign supreme. We talk incessantly about delays but now the time has arrived to launch a crusade against the scourge of arrears. Both the Bar and the Bench as equal partners in the administration of justice must address themselves to this problem.”
A murder suspect was brutally thrashed by a mob and left almost dead in Bihar’s Hajipur district Saturday while policemen watched.
The mob snatched Ravi, who had allegedly killed his friend in a quarrel over a cell phone in Hajipur’s Pokhra neighbourhood, from police custody in the morning and beat him with bamboo sticks and bricks and kicked him repeatedly. This was the third incident of mob lynching in Bihar in the last one week.