The Best Bakery case has now become notorious. Let me briefly enumerate the main events: the burning alive of 14 persons by a riotous mob on March 1, 2002; the recommendation made thereafter by the NHRC (in May 2002) on a suo motu inquiry that the case should be investigated only by the CBI in view of the climate of fear prevalent in Vadodara; the contumacious refusal of the state Government to follow this statutory advice; the investigation of the case by the Gujarat Police (characterised by the judge recently trying the case as "shoddy investigative work"); the trial of the 21 accused before the fast-track court in April-May 2003 during which 73 witnesses (many of them eyewitnesses) gave evidence and out of which more than 40 witnesses retracted statements previously given to the police in which they had identified the accused; the judgement of acquittal handed down on June 21 in which there appears the naive observation that, "Courts actually are courts of evidence, not courts of justice"(!); the subsequent revelations that two of the principal eyewitnesses (wife and daughter of the murdered bakery owner) had confided to media people after the judgement that they had actually given false evidence at the trial and had refused to implicate the accused under pressure of threats by influential third persons.

A good judge needs to have a "third ear" to hear and comprehend what is not said.

This sordid train of events point to only one definite conclusion: that there has been an undeniable failure of justice in a most sensitive high-profile case. Whether the accused were, in fact, innocent of the offence charged, whether witnesses who retracted their prior statements were compelled to do so by threats to their lives, whether the investigation was conducted with the seriousness and competence that the nature of the case required-all this is best left to wiser heads in our judicial hierarchy. The Chief Justice of Gujarat must act swiftly and on his own. I recall in my early years at the Bombay Bar, on a particular morning after a news item reported a monstrous order passed by the Chief Presidency Magistrate, Chief Justice Chagla called upon the government pleader in open court to bring the case up the next day. The administration of justice by courts needs no interlocutor or facilitator.

The Best Bakery case has also highlighted-as perhaps no other case has-the urgent need to implement the recommendations made by the Malimath Committee in its March 2003 report on reforms in the criminal justice system.

The Committee suggests, for instance, that provision be made in the Criminal Procedure Code that "the quest for truth shall be the fundamental duty of every court" and that the court be obligated by law to summon any person as a witness, or recall and re-examine any person already examined, as it appears necessary for "discovering the truth in the case".

But the crying need of the hour is "robust judging". The trial judge is the lynchpin in every case. He is also its eyes and ears. He is not merely a recorder of facts but a purveyor of all evidence-oral and circumstantial. A good judge needs to have a "third ear" to hear and comprehend what is not said! When a material eyewitness whose near and dear have been murdered and who has identified the accused in his police statement says in his evidence at the trial that he cannot recall the faces or names of anyone, this must obviously excite suspicion in the mind of a proactive, truth seeking judge. He must, for instance, probe further and ask the witness (even if the prosecutor does not do so) as to why he had so stated before the police shortly after the incident and whether he had met with anybody before giving evidence in court and had been tutored or compelled to say what had been just deposed to. No new law is required for this.

Our higher courts must remind magistrates and judges acting in all courts in the country that the whole purpose of producing evidence in court is to find out the truth of what actually occurred, that a trial is not a game or contest to be won or lost by the number of witnesses called but to be assessed for their quality and credibility, and that fast-track courts are not there only to finish off pending cases but to see that justice is administered in each and every one of them. The time-honoured presumption of innocence of persons accused of heinous offences must never be permitted to be used as a convenient shibboleth to subvert the course of justice. The great concept of Equality before the Law, which is a constitutional mandate, must protect both the rights of persons accused of a crime and the rights of victims of that crime.

The author is a well-known jurist and member of Parliament.