International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

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Volume 8 Issue 5
September-October 2026

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Is Justice Truly Accessible in India? Examining Judicial Delays, Corruption, and Inequitable Access to Legal Representation Among Marginalised Communities

Author(s) Ms. Saanvi Jaiswal
Country India
Abstract The Indian Constitution guarantees every citizen equal access to justice under Articles 14, 21, and 39A, yet the machinery meant to deliver on that guarantee is straining under more than five crore pending cases, a well documented culture of bribery in police stations and lower courts, and a free legal aid system that reaches only a small fraction of those constitutionally entitled to it. This paper argues that judicial delay, everyday corruption, and inadequate legal aid should not be treated as three isolated administrative failures inside an otherwise neutral legal order. Drawing on Marxist legal theory, particularly Evgeny Pashukanis's account of the legal subject as a form borrowed from the commodity relation, on materialist feminist scholarship on unpaid social reproduction, on Indian feminist historiography concerning the relationship between caste and gender, and on B.R. Ambedkar's warning that India had achieved political democracy without social democracy, the paper argues that access to the formal legal system in India is systematically rationed along the lines of class, gender, and caste, and that this rationing is constitutive of how Indian law functions rather than incidental to it. It further argues that even where women do win in court, the social relations that produced their grievance frequently survive the judgment intact, and can be mobilised to undo it. The paper draws on government pendency data, national and international corruption surveys, legal aid budget analysis, and seven landmark Indian court cases, spanning the Mathura custodial rape case of 1972, through the Shah Bano maintenance case of 1985, to the Bilkis Bano remission case of 2024, to substantiate these claims empirically. It closes by considering serious objections to a purely structural account and by outlining what a genuinely redistributive, rather than merely procedural, reform agenda for access to justice in India would need to include.
Published In Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On 2026-10-23
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CrossRef DOI prefix of IJFMR is 10.36948/ijfmr

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