Unshackling The Elephant By Anand Prasad: Insights On Indian Justice System Reform

India’s justice system evokes a common mix of responses. There is respect for its constitutional role, and frustration with how it works in practice. Courts are crowded and cases take time. Procedural niceties often seems to matter more than relief to the litigant. Familiar complaints regarding the functioning of our legal system surface in conversations between lawyers, in weekend speeches by judges, and now increasingly, in public debate. However, repetition has brought little change. Over time, dysfunction has come to feel routine. It is this state of being comfortably numb that ‘Unshackling the Elephant’ seeks to disturb.

Written by Mr. Anand Prasad (or Anand, as he insists even his junior colleagues call him), the book’s central metaphor is deliberate and provocative. The image Mr Prasad uses is an apt one. The Indian legal system, he suggests, is like a powerful elephant - strong, capable, and potentially transformative - but constrained by barriers of its own making. These restraints are not merely procedural delays or infrastructural shortages. They are deeper: colonial legacies, misplaced reverence for form over substance, and a reluctance to question entrenched systems.

The core strength of the book lies in the vantage point from where it is written. Mr Prasad does not approach the justice system as a distant critic or reform theorist. He writes as a practising lawyer who has spent years working within the system, building one of India’s most successful law firms, advising clients, and navigating courts as they actually function. That experience shapes both the tone and the focus of the book.

That perspective is clearest in the book’s discussion of commercial litigation. Mr. Prasad draws on personal experience to show how delay is often a rational choice. For instance, he recounts a case where a company faced a large and legitimate monetary claim but chose not to pay. Court delays, low interest awards, and weak cost regimes meant that litigation was cheaper than compliance. Even after legal fees, dragging the case through court made economic sense. The example is telling. It shows how the system can reward default and penalise prompt payment.

Mr. Prasad’s response is direct. He argues for stricter cost regimes and more realistic interest awards, so that courts do not become safe shelters for delay. The aim is not punishment, but correction. If litigation stops being cheaper than compliance, behaviour will change. Here, the book is at its strongest. The argument is practical, grounded, and shaped by experience rather than theory.

A similar clarity appears in Mr. Prasad’s treatment of the judiciary. In one of the book’s more striking arguments, he suggests that judges should begin to see themselves as service providers rather than sovereign authorities dispensing justice from above. In a country that still speaks of judges as “lordships” and treats adjudication as a near-divine act, this is almost radical. Mr. Prasad does not deny the need for independence. He questions whether independence must also mean insulation from accountability.

He argues for transparent performance-review mechanisms that align incentives with the quality and speed of justice delivered. The judiciary, he suggests, should see itself as serving the public rather than ruling over it. The shift in language matters. It moves the conversation away from reverence and towards responsibility. Few books aimed at a general audience make this point so plainly.

Technology forms another major strand of the book. Mr. Prasad is clear that digitisation is no longer optional. Indian courts have experimented with e-filing, online orders, and virtual hearings, but he describes these efforts as piecemeal. They have helped, but they have not transformed the system. Transformation, he argues, requires a coherent plan rather than scattered fixes.

Mr. Prasad also sets out some of his most ambitious ideas with regard to pendency and the slow movement of cases. He proposes strict timelines for case disposal—weeks for routine civil disputes, months for minor offences, and fixed outer limits even for complex litigation and appeals. The goals are clearly defined and reflect the general impatience with the open ended litigation timelines in India. At the same time, the book offers less detail on how such timelines would be achieved across courts with uneven resources and heavy caseloads.

The later chapters move toward larger questions of culture and constitutional design. Prasad argues that Indian law has not fully shed its colonial inheritance and that reform must speak more honestly to Indian social realities. He frames this as a question of legitimacy. Law, he suggests, cannot command trust if it feels distant or alien.

That concern has been voiced elsewhere as well. In a recent interview, Senior Advocate Chander Lall observed that the justice system can often feel as though it has been shaped around lawyers, rather than around the citizens who are meant to use it. The comment reflects a wider unease about how courts are experienced by those without familiarity, patience, or influence.

Mr. Prasad recognises this imbalance and returns to it across the book. Even when his analysis is institutional, the question he keeps circling back to is how the system feels to the ordinary litigant, and how easily it can overwhelm them. It is also worth noting that while attention often settles on the book’s discussion of commercial law, the rest of the terrain is not ignored. Questions of court culture, accountability, technology, and constitutional design run alongside the commercial analysis.

Seen as a whole, Unshackling the Elephant works best as an intervention rather than a finished plan. It does not offer a completely ready blueprint. Instead, it asks us - citizens in general, and legal professionals in particular to rethink what we have come to accept as normal. It treats delay, hierarchy, and ritual not as an inevitable part of the process, but as choices that can be revisited. The elephant metaphor captures the overall theme of the book well.

Mr. Prasad may not have had identified solutions resolve to every issue that he identifies. In fact, one most note there are no easy and ready solutions to some of the problems our judicial system faces. What Unshackling the elephant, does extremely well is to bring the issues out into the open. The book is written in a manner that is accessible to the ordinary reader. Readers willing to engage with a serious, attempt to rethink how justice is delivered will find much to consider. I sincerely believe that Mr. Prasad’s effort will begin a larger conversation. I have high hopes that this conversation, if carried forward will lead us to much needed change.

Pranjal Kishore is a Delhi-based lawyer.