Delhi high court cracks down on India’s favourite delaying tactic

Sunny Deol expressed disgust at it in his 1993 blockbuster Damini when he said ‘tareekh pe tareekh’ and more recently, a TV commercial, ‘chalta rahe, chalta rahe’, used it to highlight the longevity of a plywood brand.

Now, the Delhi high court (HC) has taken note of the concerns of aggrieved litigants and witnesses who are made to suffer due to the culture of adjournments in a country where at least 3.2 crore cases are pending.

Refusing to take it any more, justice SN Dhingra imposed a fine of Rs25,000 on a petitioner and his counsel who had been seeking adjournments from a trial court for the past two-and-half-years, apparently to delay justice.

When at last the trial court rejected the petitioner’s plea to reexamine a witness after two-and-half-months of his deposition, he moved HC.

Justice Dhingra upheld the trial court’s decision on Wednesday and observed that it appears as if “courts exist for providing business to advocates and if advocates are busy in high courts or other courts and choose not to appear for false and lame excuses, witnesses are to suffer and the system has to suffer, the party has to suffer but the advocates’ business should not suffer”.

The concerned judge ridiculed the practice of adjournments, saying “this attitude towards litigation and courts must be brought to an end, it must be made clear that courts do not exist for providing business to advocates. They exist for adjudicating disputes between parties and witnesses or litigants cannot be given shabby treatment by granting adjournment after adjournment as if they had done something wrong by bringing a suit to the court. They are made to appear in court 20 times when the evidence can be over in one hearing”.

Last month, justice Dhingra had asked the bar council to take appropriate action against a lawyer who had been seeking adjournments on such frail grounds that his senior’s car had been stolen.

The malaise of adjournments has also anguished the Bombay high court, which recently ordered that an adjournment will not come cheap and imposed a cost of Rs25,000 on the central government, whose counsel had sought an adjournment to file response to a petition, although the government had already been granted time and opportunity to file it.

An analyst said the law does provide sufficient safeguards against adjournments. Order XVII of the civil procedure code provides that only three adjournments will be granted to a party during the course of a suit. It provides that adjournments will be granted only for a “sufficient cause” and “where the circumstances are beyond the control of a party”. “Yet, its implementation and enforcement is lacking,” he said.