In November 1992, somewhere in Bihar’s Vaishali district, a neighbour’s objection to broken glass on a pathway ended in violence. A couple was attacked. A complaint was filed. A chargesheet followed in 1993. Charges were framed in 1999. And then nothing for decades. The wheels of India’s justice system turned, slowly, almost inaudibly, until 2026, when an 84-year-old man named Deep Rai was finally convicted of attempted murder.
Thirty-three years. By the time the verdict arrived, four of the other accused had already died. The victims had grown old waiting. And the man convicted was too elderly to likely serve any meaningful sentence. Justice, technically, was delivered. But at what cost, and for whom, and does it even mean anything at this point?
India’s judicial backlog is not a secret. It is a catastrophe hiding in plain sight. As of early 2025, over 5 crore (50 million) cases are pending across Indian courts. The Supreme Court alone has over 80,000 pending cases. District and subordinate courts, where most ordinary Indians seek justice, are the most overwhelmed, carrying more than 4.4 crore pending cases between them.
The average time to resolve a civil dispute in India, according to the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, can stretch anywhere between 10 and 20 years. Criminal cases often fare no better. A 2019 study by Daksh, a governance research organisation, found that the average time for a Sessions Court to complete a trial was over 4 years, and that was the average. Cases involving multiple accused, poor documentation, witness intimidation, or repeated adjournments can drag far longer.
Deep Rai’s case was not an anomaly. It was a portrait of the ordinary. One of the most quietly destructive features of India’s legal system is the adjournment culture. A single case can be adjourned dozens, sometimes hundreds of times. The reasons range from legitimate (illness, floods, strikes) to entirely manufactured.
For those with money, adjournments are a strategy. Hire the right lawyer, file the right applications, and a case can be delayed long enough for witnesses to die, memories to fade, or political winds to shift. For those without money, delay is punishment in itself. An undertrial prisoner in India spends an average of 1.5 to 2 years in jail before their case is even heard, not because they have been convicted of anything, but simply because they cannot afford bail or legal representation.
According to National Crime Records Bureau data, undertrials make up over 75% of India’s prison population. The majority are poor, from marginalised communities, and charged with petty offences. They wait in jail longer than the sentence they would have received if convicted. The system, in their case, delivers punishment before the verdict.
This is where the Deep Rai case stops being just a story about one village dispute and becomes something far more uncomfortable.
India does not have one justice system. It has two, one for those who can afford to navigate it, and one for those who cannot.
When a powerful politician is accused of serious crime, the sequence is predictable: bail is obtained quickly, the trial drags for years, witnesses turn hostile, and the accused continues to hold office, contest elections, and appear at public events. According to data from the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), as of the 2024 general elections, over 46% of re-elected MPs had criminal cases against them. Of these, 31% faced serious charges including murder, kidnapping, and crimes against women.
These cases do not take 33 years because the system is slow. They take long or often go nowhere at all because the system can be steered.
Meanwhile, a farmer from Vaishali waits three decades for closure on a neighbourhood dispute involving broken glass. The contrast is not coincidental. It is structural.
Perhaps the most dangerous long-term effect of a broken system is what it does to public consciousness. Psychologist Martin Seligman’s concept of learned helplessness, where repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative outcomes leads people to stop trying to change their circumstances, maps uncomfortably well onto how many Indians now relate to the justice system.
People know the system is slow. They know it favours the wealthy. They know powerful people routinely escape accountability. And increasingly, they have
stopped being surprised by it. Outrage has curdled into frustration, and frustration has settled into a dull, exhausted acceptance.
This normalisation is politically convenient. When citizens stop demanding accountability, those in power face fewer consequences for misconduct. When criticism is dismissed as anti-national sentiment, or deflected through communal and caste polarisation, genuine systemic failures continue unchallenged. The population stays divided along lines that do not threaten the powerful, and the corruption continues above all of it.
The solutions are not unknown. Fast-track courts have shown results; POCSO fast-track courts, for instance, have significantly reduced timelines in sexual assault cases involving children. Judicial vacancies urgently need filling; India has roughly 21 judges per million people against a recommended strength of 50. Legal aid must be genuinely accessible, not merely on paper.
But solutions require political will, and political will requires public pressure, and public pressure requires a population that still believes change is possible.
The case of Deep Rai is a small story from a small district. But it holds a large mirror up to a system that is slow for the powerless, lenient for the powerful, and sustained by the quiet, creeping belief that this is simply how things are and always will be. That belief is the most dangerous verdict of all.
Sources:
- 5 crore+ pending cases — Supreme Court of India reports and Law Commission data, widely cited in Indian legal journalism
- Supreme Court 80,000+ pending cases — reported across The Hindu, LiveLaw, Bar & Bench
- 4.4 crore cases in district courts — National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) figures
- Average Sessions Court trial: 4+ years — Daksh India’s People, Politics and Policymakers report (2019)
- Undertrials = 75%+ of prison population — NCRB Prison Statistics India reports
- Undertrial average wait: 1.5–2 years — documented in multiple NCRB and NALSA reports
- 46% re-elected MPs with criminal cases; 31% with serious charges — Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), 2024 election data • 21 judges per million people vs recommended 50 — Law Commission of India, 230th Report
- Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness — established psychological concept, no citation needed
- POCSO fast-track courts reducing timelines — Ministry of Law & Justice annual reports