The volatile debate over the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO) leaves me puzzled. If we were a country in which justice worked as efficiently as it does in western democracies, we could afford to be worried by preventive detention and draconian powers in the hands of the police. But this is India folks and for the average Indian, the police already has draconian powers. Rape victims have been known to be raped by the policemen whose help they seek and this causes so much terror that in rural India women prefer to stay away from police stations. Ordinary Indians going about their daily business are routinely shot dead in "encounters" not just in villages but in cities like Mumbai and Delhi. What happens to the policemen who execute these extra-judicial killings? Nobody knows.
By the time they are brought to justice-usually after 20 years-nobody remembers or cares except the relatives of their victims.

This is not to say that we should happily support a law that gives the police even more power. The point I am making is that if Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley spent more time improving the justice system than defending POTO, he might be doing a more useful job. In his defence, it needs to be said that he has tried harder than most of his predecessors, but with a backlog in our courts that will take more than 300 years to clear, his efforts have been, at best, feeble.

Jaitley has reduced procedural delays in civil cases and has attempted to set up "fast-track" courts across the country, but little has been done to rid us of silly laws that cause much of the problem. In fact, quite the opposite has been happening. We now have a ban on smoking in public.

Did the Supreme Court judges who imposed it think about how this ban was going to be policed? About the opportunities corrupt policemen now have to extract money from our poorest citizens if they are caught smoking a bidi in public at the end of a hard day's work? Did they at all stop to wonder whether a ban on smoking was necessary when breathing the foul air in our cities amounts to smoking a packet of cigarettes a day?

We like to copy what the West does and-despite our anti-Americanism-we are in awe of America as we are of no other country. So, if the Americans can ban smoking in public places we must do it and if they feel the need for stricter laws to stop terrorism then we must have them too. Our problem is that we emulate only the easy stuff. We do not bother to try and clean the air in our cities or provide our citizens with clean drinking water or unadulterated food or sanitary living conditions. These things would take too long and require too much work. So, why not place a ban on smoking?

Our judges have as much a role in improving our decrepit justice system as the law minister does, but here they appear to feel that they have no role to play. Why, for instance, does the chief justice not consider fining judges and lawyers who allow cases to drag on indefinitely? Would this not be more important than a ban on smoking in public places? Why do they not set deadlines for at least cases of vital public interest like the Uphaar cinema case in which more than 50 innocent citizens lost their lives because of the criminal negligence of municipal officials? What about the massacres of Sikhs in 1984? Is it not sickening that more than 3,000 people were killed in the city of Delhi alone and we have still not been able to bring the killers to justice?

The Congress, responsible in its time for a much uglier law called TADA, is hugely exercised over POTO. Even Silent Sonia has become so vocal on the subject that they say the prime minister currently spends a lot of his time wooing her support in Parliament. Fine, but would Sonia Gandhi like to publicly declare why she does not demand that those who killed innocent Sikhs in 1984 be brought to justice? What about just one little walkout from the Lok Sabha over this issue?

Let me make it clear that I am against POTO because I believe that it will only make it easier for the police to do their job in a shoddier fashion. I am also against it because I find it hard to believe that it will be more effective than TADA which gave us a conviction rate of just over 1 per cent. What I am saying is that in my view POTO will make little difference to a justice system in such an abysmal state of collapse that we had Masood Azhar and Omar Sheikh in jail for five years without trial. After our foreign minister graciously escorted them to Kandahar in exchange for the passengers of IC-814 they have gone on to achieve mighty feats of terrorism. Azhar's Jaish-e-Mohammed recently tried to blow up the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly and Sheikh was involved with the events of September 11. With the rot going so deep can we seriously believe POTO will make a difference?