NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 11 Chapter opener — The Big Questions

Justice is the assurance that every person is treated fairly and gets what is due to them under the law. The Preamble to the Constitution of India promises all Indian citizens social, economic, and political justice, and the founders of independent India laid the foundation for a sound judicial system in a democratic society to deliver on that promise.

The chapter builds the idea in three steps.

1. Justice is what makes shared life possible. It ensures that individuals in a society can live with equality and dignity. Without it, a disagreement has no fair ending and society cannot stay peaceful.
2. Government pursues justice through law. As societies grew larger and more complex, the task of ensuring fair treatment was handed over to the government. Governments were given the power to administer society through laws and to enforce them, with force if needed. Laws are general rules that regulate people’s activities and impose consequences — a fine, compensation to the affected party, or even imprisonment — for not following them.
3. Law and justice are not the same thing. A law can itself be unjust, and then justice becomes the standard by which we judge the law. That is why, after independence, hundreds of colonial-era laws were found to be discriminatory and contrary to the fundamental principles of a democratic polity, and over 1500 such laws have been repealed.

The chapter names two of them: the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, which labelled certain communities as criminals by birth, and the Vernacular Press Act, 1878, which restricted freedom of the press. It also points outside India — the ‘Jim Crow laws’ in parts of the United States barred African Americans and other people of colour from water fountains, public pools and restaurants reserved for white people, and were officially repealed in the 1960s; the apartheid laws of South Africa divided people by law on the basis of race and were repealed in 1991.

Finally, justice itself has two faces, and a decision is properly just only when both are satisfied.

Because a society without justice cannot stay at peace. Justice is essential for maintaining peace and harmony in any society — it is what allows individuals to live with equality and dignity, and it is the reason people are willing to settle a quarrel through an institution instead of through force.

The chapter gives four connected reasons.

• Disputes are unavoidable. Society has many complex interactions happening all the time, both personal and professional, so disagreements and disputes arise from diverse contexts and situations. A society needs a settled, trustworthy way of ending them — through dialogue, mediation, or adjudication by courts of law.
• Everyone must be able to complain, and to be heard. The judicial system is exactly the system that enables individuals to complain in case of a grievance, and lets the affected person place their point of view so that justice is ensured within the framework of the law and the Constitution. That is what stops the stronger party from simply winning.
• Justice restrains the government itself. An independent judiciary ensures that the laws passed by the legislature stay within the framework of the Constitution, and that the executive does not overstep its role as outlined in the Constitution. In a democracy this is not a small matter — it is how a citizen’s Fundamental Rights are kept real rather than merely written down.
• Injustice spreads. The chapter opens with Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Unjust laws — Jim Crow in the United States, apartheid in South Africa — did not only harm the people directly targeted; they prevented citizens from gaining access to public facilities and from living a life with dignity, and they made the whole society unequal.

The chapter’s own examples show what happens when justice is delivered:

The Indian judicial system is a unified system — a single hierarchy of courts running from the district up to the national level, with the Supreme Court of India at the apex, the High Courts at the State level and Subordinate Courts at the District level.

The Supreme Court of India is the highest court of law in the country. It came into existence on the day the Constitution came into effect, 26.01.1950. Article 124 provides for its establishment and it is seated in New Delhi. Its Chief Justice is designated the Chief Justice of India. Judges are appointed by the President of India; to be appointed a person must be a citizen of India and additionally must have been a Judge of a High Court (or High Courts) for five years, or an Advocate of a High Court (or more than one High Court) for ten years, or a distinguished jurist in the opinion of the President.

Its powers are grouped by the kind of case it can take up:

The High Courts are the highest courts at the State level. Article 214 provides for a High Court in each State; India has 28 States but 25 High Courts, because in some cases two or more States or Union Territories share a common High Court — the Bombay High Court, for instance, covers Maharashtra, Goa and the Union Territory of Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu. A High Court has a Chief Justice and other judges, the number varying from State to State; they are appointed by the President in consultation with the Chief Justice of India, the Governor of the State and the Chief Justice of the concerned High Court. Under Article 217(2) a judge must be a citizen of India and must have held a judicial office in India or been an advocate of a High Court (or more than one) for ten years. Each High Court exercises writ jurisdiction (Article 226), hears appeals from subordinate courts in civil and criminal matters and from certain tribunals, and has the power of superintendence over all courts and tribunals in its territory (Article 227) — a supervisory power, to be exercised sparingly, that keeps subordinate courts acting within their authority.

Subordinate Courts sit below the High Courts in each State — District Courts, Sessions Courts, Revenue Courts, Small Causes Courts and others. Articles 233 to 237 regulate how they are organised and secure their independence; District Judges are appointed by the Governor of the State in consultation with the High Court. Alongside the courts stand specialised tribunals, which are quasi-judicial and decide particular categories of dispute — the NCLT (corporate, insolvency and bankruptcy), the National Green Tribunal (environmental issues), Consumer Fora (consumer disputes), the Central Administrative Tribunal (service matters of government employees), the Armed Forces Tribunal, and APTEL (electricity disputes).

They are ways of settling a dispute without a full court trial. Courts increasingly encourage litigants to use them, both to strengthen dispute resolution and to reduce the burden on the judiciary — the chapter lists arbitration, mediation/conciliation, negotiation, Lok Adalat and, alongside them, Gram Nyayalayas.