Why does India have so many wonderful laws?

India’s judicial power is very independent, but it has failed to curb administrative corruption. The Indian government recently banned 224 Chinese apps including WeChat and Alipay. The Indian court’s summoning Jack Ma has become the focus of global news.

 

What kind of judicial system does India have, with its GDP plummeting and the world’s bottom in its integrity?

According to the latest data released by the Ministry of Health of India on September 24, the number of newly confirmed cases in India exceeded 86,000 and the total number of confirmed cases exceeded 5.73 million.

Under the trend of rapid growth for several consecutive days, India has surpassed Brazil to become the second country in the world with confirmed cases of new crown, and it is catching up with the United States.

 

At the same time, in recent months, the tensions in the Sino-Indian border area have escalated. On September 7, the Indian army illegally crossed the line again and entered the Shenpao Mountain area on the south bank of Pangong Lake in the western section of the Sino-Indian border.

The negotiating patrol personnel of the Chinese border guards fired threats, and the Chinese border guards were forced to take countermeasures to stabilize the situation on the ground. On the other hand, there were voices in India that were totally boycotting Chinese products.

 

In the Chinese-language Internet world, the two forces of “India Blow” and “India Black” are opposed, and neither side fails to reflect the objective India.

 

The IFs model predicted that under ideal conditions, China will surpass the United States in 2030, and India will surpass China in 2099 and become the world’s largest GDP country.

 

In addition to the political and economic complex reasons, Indian laws also frequently “fire guns” with other countries. For example, in early September, in order to suppress Chinese companies, the Indian government announced the ban on 118 Chinese apps, including WeChat and Alipay.

 

According to a report from Global.com citing India’s “Financial Express”, on June 29, the Indian government announced the ban on 59 Chinese apps, and a month later it announced the ban again on 47 Chinese apps. So far, the Indian government has banned 224 Chinese apps.

 

Recalling the earlier focus: at the end of July, Jack Ma was accused in India

A subpoena from the Gurgaon Court in New Delhi immediately became a global news item. This is actually just a small lawsuit. It originated from Ali’s UC India company. A former Indian employee claimed that he was “illegal fired”, so he took both UC India and Jack Ma to court, claiming more than 2 million yuan.

 

Alibaba couldn’t bear it, and finally responded on the earnings call on August 20. It will stop UC web and other innovative business services in India, but it will not affect the group as a whole.

Zhang Yong, the current chairman of the board and CEO of Alibaba Group, said that globalization is Alibaba’s long-term strategy, but we also need to look at the changes in the current environment, including changes in the geopolitical environment, and related national policies. Change, then we will adjust our strategy accordingly.

 

It stands to reason that this employee’s suing UC India is justified, but Jack Ma is neither a director nor a shareholder of UC. He has also stepped down as chairman of Ali in the past two years. It can be said that he cannot be beaten by eight.

Why did the court follow the plaintiff’s request Summoning Jack Ma?

 

1. The incredible judicial system

Summoning Jack Ma is actually nothing in India. Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing and Samsung Chairman Li Jianxi have received summons from the Indian court.

 

Coca-Cola has kept its formula secret for more than 120 years, and it is still locked in a safe at the Atlanta Sun Trust Bank in the United States. It has not been required to be disclosed in any country, but the Indian court required them to disclose it as a test for passing beverage safety indicators. conditions of.

 

India is a common law country that maintains a mixed legal system. The law was grafted to Britain, which came to colonize here hundreds of years ago. There are more than 3,000 laws today, and many regulations were formed in the farming period hundreds of years ago, which are incompatible with modern society.

For example, the “Incitation Gathering Prevention Act” of 1911 restricted the dance floor to no more than 10 pairs of dancers.

 

 

Government Only has the right to engage in postal services

There is also the India Postal Act of 1898, which stipulates that only the government has the right to engage in postal services. In order to circumvent this law, local express companies in India can only refer to “mails” as “objects.” But foreign companies are afraid to divide the cake because India’s enforcement of foreign companies is “extraordinarily” strict.

 

Is judicial system chaotic i India?

India’s judicial system has always been chaotic, and opposition parties riots in parliament from time to time. On September 20th, local time just in the past, the Indian Federal House (upper house) met to discuss and pass two important agricultural reform bills.

However, it was immediately opposed by members of the opposition party present. Opposition lawmakers rushed to the rostrum to try to snatch the deputy. The speaker of the speaker even rushed directly to the deputy speaker and tore up the bill documents. The scene was chaotic.

 

The fact that legal incidents frequently appear behind the hot news is closely related to India’s incredible judicial system.

The direct consequence of “uninhibited and indulgent” justice is that the court system is not compatible with the rule of law, which encourages the growth of various “wonderful laws”.

If the law is not forward-looking and cannot keep pace with the times, it will become a “draconian law” and hinder social and economic development.

 

India’s reform and opening up began in 1991. In the past 30 years, its population is 1.3 billion, and its GDP is only 1/5 of my country. After the reform and opening up, Prime Minister Rao repealed nearly 600 laws, and Modi also repealed hundreds of them, but there are still nearly 2,000 old laws.

 

India’s procedural law also came from the United Kingdom hundreds of years ago, and there is no stipulation for the trial period. It is common for a case to be held dozens of times and drag on for decades. The court’s backlog of cases over the years has reached 300,000. If the current trial speed is used, it will take four to five hundred years to clear and close the cases.

 

How many  cases are pending in Indian Judiciary according to the Supreme Court’s annual report?

According to a data as of November 2019, according to the annual report of the Supreme Court of India, the Supreme Court has 59,867 cases pending trial, and the high courts have 4.475 million cases pending trial.

At the district court and lower court levels, pending The number of cases reached 31,400. The Supreme Court’s disposal rate has been maintained between 55% and 59%, the high court’s 28%, and the lower court’s 40%. 20 million new cases are filed every year, and this backlog may take up to 320 years to resolve.

 

The statutory law in India is very complicated, and the precedent system has further reduced the efficiency of the judiciary. The longest precedent in India is as long as 100,000 words, and the large number of precedents that increase every year makes it difficult for judges and lawyers to quickly accept it.

 

In addition, India’s laws are classified in detail and there are various cases, but they lack an effective management method in case management. According to research, there are at least 2500 classifications of cases in India in 2016.

 

In addition, the management of case procedures is also very lengthy, and the time-consuming between each procedure can often be as long as a week or even several months. According to the 2018-2019 Indian Economic Survey Report, about 30% of the case time was spent on simple notifications.

 

In terms of trial time, 23% of high court cases have been waiting for more than 10 years. Overall, 29% of high court cases took 2-5 years. In the lower courts, more than 8% of the cases are pending for ten years.

At most 47% of the lower courts have been waiting for one to two years (about 120 million cases). According to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2019, the average time required to judge a case in an Indian court is 1,445 days.

 

The World Bank’s annual survey shows that “the time for the Mumbai court to resolve economic cases is more than twice that of the Shanghai court.”

 

The inefficiency of the judicial system in India is a commonplace, but it is strange that the plaintiff filed a lawsuit against UC India and Jack Ma on July 20, and the first court hearing was held on July 29. It is a rare “high efficiency”.

 

2. Independent justice cannot save corruption

However, India is a completely separated country with very independent judicial power. The power of judges in India is beyond the reach of judges all over the world.

 

In 2015, the Federal Government of India tried to lay a bar on the selection of justices for the Supreme Court and passed parliamentary legislation to influence the selection of justices. However, the Supreme Court directly ruled that the “insertion” bill was unconstitutional and invalid, and the selection of the justices still followed the previous “colleague selection system.”

 

Therefore, in India’s judicial power, it is not easy for the government to insert a needle. Similar to the Indian administrative and judicial game, it also occurred in a major tax case of Li Ka-shing.

In 2017, Li Ka-shing’s Hutchison claimed that its wholly-owned subsidiary Hedian International received an assessment order from the Indian Taxation Bureau and required payment Taxes and fines of 39.2 billion Hong Kong dollars.

 

How did this 39.2 billion come from regarding Hutchison Whampoa?

This huge tax came from Hutchison Whampoa’s sale of up to US$5 billion in Indian telecommunications business to Vodafone in the Netherlands in 2007. The transaction did not pay taxes to the Indian government at the time, because Hutchison Whampoa and Vodafone are offshore companies registered in the Cayman Islands and are not within the jurisdiction of India.

 

However, the Indian Revenue Agency felt that it would not be enough to eat such a large piece of fat, and was unwilling to insist that Li Ka-shing pay 9.6 billion Hong Kong dollars in capital gains tax. Later, both parties submitted the dispute to the Supreme Court for ruling.

 

In 2012, the Supreme Court of India determined that, according to the Income Tax Act, taxes only need to be paid when the transfer of capital assets occurs in India. Both Vodafone of the Netherlands and Hedian International are non-tax resident companies in India.

The transfer of capital and assets of both parties occurred outside India, and the Indian Revenue Agency has no right to collect taxes on the acquisition.

 

However, the Indian government was still not reconciled. Congress issued a supplementary law to expand the interpretation of the 1961 Income Tax Act in an attempt to overturn the Supreme Court’s judgment. It also completely ignored the principle of “the law is not retroactive” and forcibly used the 2012 law. , To levy Li Ka-shing’s 2007 transaction tax.

 

Li Ka-shing has always been tough, ignoring the Indian Revenue Agency. As a result, the ten-year interest plus fines has changed from the original 9.6 billion Hong Kong dollars to nearly 40 billion. The administrative corruption in India can be seen here.

 

3. Integrity bottom

A few years ago, the Supreme Court of India also issued an arrest warrant to Lee Jianxi, the then chairman of Samsung in South Korea, requesting him to go to India for criminal punishment, because Samsung’s Dubai subsidiary refused to pay an arrearage of US$1.43 million to the Indian supplier. .

 

Samsung came out to clarify that Li Jianxi has nothing to do with this case, and he is not involved in the daily operations of many overseas subsidiaries. And a month later, Li Jianxi was hospitalized because of a sudden heart attack. But the Indian court did not persevere and issued a subpoena again.

 

In the end, Samsung had no choice but to say that it believed that the Indian courts would follow legal and fair procedures to find out that Li Jianxi had nothing to do with the incident.

 

It can be seen that, in comparison, the Indian court summoning Jack Ma is nothing. Moreover, under the Indian legal system, the prosecutor can appoint anyone as the defendant, and the court finally decides whether to include it. However, the question of whether the defendant is eligible is usually dealt with after the defendant’s defense, which can better protect the right of litigation.

 

The provisions of my country’s Civil Procedure Law on the conditions for prosecution only require that there be a “clear” defendant, not a “appropriate” defendant, because sometimes the accused did not inform the wrong person, and this can only be determined after substantive review.

After the trial, it is clear that the plaintiff was wrong, then either the defendant was changed or the plaintiff’s claim was rejected.

 

In the case of UC and Jack Ma, the Indian court did not force me to appear in court. Ma Yun can send someone to respond to the suit, and the court may make a judgment on his part first, without affecting the continuation of other procedures.

But from the standpoint of Alibaba’s “stopping UC web and other innovative services in India”, it is unlikely to respond to the suit. The simplest and most straightforward way is to ignore it or make a clean break.

 

The recent Sino-Indian relations have become increasingly tense, India has been banning Chinese mobile phone applications, and ethnic confrontation has been on the rise.

 

When the border conflict broke out between China and India in 1962, the Indian side confiscated all the property of Chinese companies and citizens in India without legal support and handed it over to the so-called “Enemy Property Regulatory Authority of India” (CEPI) for safekeeping.

In March 2017, it was amended and approved as a national law, called the “Enemy Country Property Act”, and stipulated that as long as the relevant “clues” are received and certain confirmation and evaluation procedures are passed, the citizens and companies of China and Pakistan Confiscation of the property.

This shows that the hostility towards China has not been eliminated. Such laws have caused great insecurity to investors and violated international consensus and the spirit of the law.

 

Is India’s integrity among the lowest in the world?

Taking the integrity of international trade contracts as an example, Chinese companies have always been among the top seven or eight in the world, but Indian companies are basically at the bottom of about 180.

In recent years, Modi has continuously promoted reforms in order to attract foreign investment.

In 2019, in the latest World Business Environment Rankings published by the World Bank, India finally climbed from the bottom of more than 130 to 63rd.

 

Conclusion

But in terms of the current status quo, we would be afraid that there is still a long way to go. Law, integrity, efficiency, etc., are all affecting the development process of this big country.

 

 

Author’s Bio

Name: Ajay Rastogi

Educational Qualification: LLB

Profession: Advocate / Lawyer

Work Experience: 20 Years of Legal Practice

Profile Link: https://lawjc.com/members/advajayrastogi/