No bar on women's wisdom

No bar on women's wisdom
Krishan Mahajan

The setting up of a separate wo-men advocates' association in the apex court is a deft slap on the face of the leadership of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) and other bodies of its kind. It clearly sends the message that the male-dominated associations in the last 50 years of their existence have not bothered to address themselves to gender concerns.

But it would be tragic if the women's association were to copy the ways of the male leadership which did not concern itself either with service to the lawyers or to acquiring knowledge of law. The SCBA has, invariably, been led by a senior advocate with clout. One would have expected the experience of such a person to manifest itself in a range of programmes addressed to specific sections of the bar, areas of the law and the Supreme Court as an institution. Instead, all efforts have gone into winning elections to the president's post.

After the elections, all energy is directed to the judges, the relevant Union ministers, and to the building up of legal business. This being the trend, other office bearers with alternative progra-mmes, are driven into observing the silence of the minority. A competition starts in the bar on three fronts: who will go and invite the judges, who will sit on the podium with the judges, who will address the media.

Perhaps the women's bar will have to battle it out on this male turf. But it will have an opportunity to make the bar and the court undertake constructive measures. Take the timing of the court's functioning, for instan-ce –it is from 10.30 am to 4 pm. A timing of 9 am to 2 pm would make use of the peak productive time of the entire bar with a half-hour break.

This provi-des the same working hours but enables lawyers to av- oid the morning traffic while coming to the courts, the evening traffic wh-ile leaving the court and the harsh summer for most of the months. A gender-sensitive court would readily agree on this working schedule. It enables women lawyers to be home early enough to manage both the work and home fronts and provides time to husbands to chip in on the home front.

There is an increasing flight of talent of the brightest men and women from the court. One of the main reasons for this is the sheer waste of time involved in waiting for a case to come up for a final hearing. Contrast this with the much more productive time utilisation that a corporate lawyer can achieve. At the end of the day, the lawyer in the apex court can easily end up feeling that nothing productive has been achieved while the corporate lawyer, working in the office, has dealt with something live, done research, be-en forced to do so-me interdisciplinary work and earned much more.

The learning curve in the apex court is te-nding more and more to remain at the bottom even as the earnings get increasingly concentrated in a few han-ds. This bodes ill for the institutions of justice in this country.

What has aggravated this situation is the complete absence of any specialised subject bodies within the bar and any linkage between corporate lawyering and legal aid or service. The absence of cross-fertilisation between legal knowledge and legal practice at all levels of the law prevents the blossoming of a well-rounded lawyer, although many lawyers tend to physical roundness because of the time-schedule of the court! The apex court is also in desperate need of a research and publications programme as part of an ov-erall reform of compulsorily linking earning with public service and gender sensitisation. Maybe, for the moment, the wo- men's bar has to specialise itself into those who organise legal business and those who execute it. But if it can generate honest debate, without the current atmosph-ere of fear in which telling the truth invites revenge on the work front, it would have done what the male bar has failed to do.

To achieve this the women's bar probably needs to set its slights as an all-India women lawyer's bar by virtue of being bused in the apex court. The male bar is an unnecessarily status conscious bar of District Court, Tribunal, High Court or Supreme Court lawyering. This only deprives a lawyer of gathering enriching experience at all levels of the justicing system. It splinters the bar and prevents a social mobility essential for the renewal and infusion of talent into the legal system.

A national partnership between such a bar and NGOs can easily marry field learning to courts so as to enable a a constant reshaping of the law to make it relevant. Today, the apex court has no women law officers and the question of a women Attorney General does not even figure as part of the golden jubilee celebrations of the Supreme Court. This is not because eligible and suitable women lawyers are not available. Even the tokenism of having one woman judge in the apex court is missing.

The women's bar needs to cut through this tokenism and the environment that simply keeps meritorious honesty out of the professional mainstream. To find nothing hateful but hypocrisy and nothing immoral but conscious hardheartedness of those who know the Constitution, is to seek a regeneration of the law in which both men and women lawyers can participate.