The High Court of Karnataka has declined to excuse delays of between 466 and 1,099 days in four appeals filed by the state government, pointing out that the timetable the appeals missed is set by a law the state itself passed.
A division bench of Justice M. Nagaprasanna and Justice Hema Kulkarni made the observations while hearing four appeals against the verdicts of a single judge, relating to the service of certain employees of Karnataka State Law University.
The Karnataka Conduct of Government Litigation Act, 2023 requires officers to keep to the period of limitation fixed for preferring an appeal, review or revision against a court verdict. None of the four appeals, the bench said, demonstrated adherence to the statutory discipline the Act contemplates.
"The time limits prescribed for movement of files, securing opinions, and taking decisions appear to have been thrown to the winds," the bench said. "The State, which enacted the law to bring order and accountability into governmental litigation, has itself failed to demonstrate fidelity to its mandate. The irony is unmistakable: the State enacted a law to arrest red tapism, but red tapism appears to have arrested the operation of the law."
The explanations offered for the delays were, in the court's account, a record of activity rather than of cause: files moving from table to table, correspondence passing from officer to officer, legal opinions being sought, documents being collected. That chronicled administrative activity, the bench held, without establishing sufficient cause to condone the delay.
The applications seeking condonation "disclose no exceptional circumstance, no compelling impediment and no credible explanation that could constitute sufficient cause for the extraordinary delays", the bench said, adding that "what is presented as an explanation is, in substance, an assortment of administrative excuses; what is sought as judicial indulgence would, if granted, amount to judicial endorsement of bureaucratic apathy".
The court also noted that one of the applications was a "verbatim reproduction" of another, and said a "copy-and-paste explanation cannot become a passport to condonation of delay".
"The State is expected to be a model litigant, not a privileged procrastinator. Its obligation is to uphold the rule of law, not to seek exceptions from its operation," the bench said. A law enacted by the state, it added, "cannot remain a mere ornament in the statute book, commanding obedience from everyone except its own author".
The bench's phrasing deserves to be taken at face value, because on a literal reading the Act has worked.
Its stated purpose was to arrest red tapism. Red tapism has been arrested. It was brought to a complete standstill somewhere between the drafting of an appeal and its filing, and held there, in one instance, for 1,099 days without moving.
This newspaper notes a further property that most legislation lacks. The Act regulates the movement of files, and it is administered by the offices whose files are moving. Compliance and non-compliance therefore leave the same trail. A file that has been stationary for three years and a file being conscientiously processed by four departments in succession are, viewed from outside, the same file.
The Department of Unnecessary Research proposes the only metric the arrangement will support. Where a law sets time limits for the movement of files, the securing of opinions and the taking of decisions, the measure of performance is how long it takes to find out whether the time limits were met.
On that measure the four appeals returned figures of between 466 and 1,099. The court has declined to treat them as achievements.
The Act remains in force. None of the four appeals before the bench tested it against a filing that was on time.