| The crime, the Covid, the politics and the potholes: Capital Letters — Keeping track of Delhi's week, one beat at a time, through the eyes and words of HT's reporters, with all the perspective, context and analysis you need. Good morning! Is it too much to expect for courtrooms to be places where guns aren’t pulled out and shots fired at litigants? Is it too much to expect that justice will be delivered upon the bang of a gavel and not of a pistol? In Delhi, it very much seems like this is too tall an ask, given the unfortunate frequency of major safety breaches in the city’s courthouses. On Friday morning, a 42-year-old woman was shot in south Delhi’s Saket court complex, in an unfortunate reminder of the wafer-thin security systems in the Capital’s courthouses and exposing the vulnerability of all stakeholders who visit these spaces for work or verdicts. Less than two years ago, in September 2021, when Delhi’s top gangster Jitender Maan (better known as Gogi) was shot dead by members of a rival group in a courtroom in front of a judge and minutes before the hearing was to begin, one could be forgiven for thinking that these breaches limited themselves to criminal groups. But then, just weeks after that shooting, a “low-intensity explosion” in the very same court, in northwest Delhi’s Rohini, left one person injured. At that time, the police arrested a scientist working with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and said the man wanted to kill his neighbour, who worked as a lawyer at the court. The two were in protracted legal battles, it seems, mostly over petty issues like mostly over petty matters such as water and parking. Not problems that would warrant an escalation to bombs and shrapnel, one would think, but who knows. Still, the two lapses led to a major inquisition, with civil society urging major reforms to ensure security where tensions invariably run high and emotions run loose. Higher courts stepped in and proposed steps to keep these spaces of justice safe. In fact, the Delhi high court in November 2021, between the Gogi shooting and the December blast, suggested a bunch of measures to shore up the checks in city courts. It also transpired that in September 2020, the high court’s registry informed a division bench that there was a need to augment the police deployment at the Rohini Court complex due to increasing security requirements, wrote HT’s Richa Banka. At the time, a report by HT’s Sanjeev K Jha found that several CCTV cameras and x-ray scanners were not functioning in court complexes. But, as evidenced by the Friday shooting, work on this front hasn’t even inched forward. Banka found that a slew of recommendations made in the aftermath of the September 2021 shooting are far from being implemented, leaving judicial premises vulnerable to incidents of violence. Among the high court’s suggestion was that the security cell of the police take over the security at the courts. It also promised setting up a Protection Review Group for regular monitoring. A senior Delhi Police officer said that though deployments have been scaled up, it's still not enough. “To increase the ratio of policemen deployed on the premises in proportion with the number of visitors, we need at least 50 companies of reserved force, which is not feasible. We had requested additional paramilitary personnel from the Centre for security at the courts, but the request is pending,” he said, asking not to be named. Another officer associated with the Security Cell confirmed that the Protection Review Group has not been constituted. These incidences of violence won’t cease till concrete security steps are put in place. It isn’t as if shootings are a recent phenomenon inside Delhi’s courts, least of all the complex at Rohini. String of recent incidents: In December 2015, a head constable was killed in the Karkardooma court when members of a rival gang opened fire at Delhi gangster Irfan (alias Chhenu Pehalwan) when he was brought there. Irfan escaped, but the constable was killed trying to protect the judge. Then, in November 2017, an undertrial was shot dead at the Rohini court while he was returning after a hearing. In May 2018, an undertrial was injured when a gangster shot at him at the Tis Hazari court. Months before the 2017 shooting inside the Rohini court, a 38-year-old undertrial was gunned down by two people outside the gate of the complex in April. We don’t need ChatGPT to tell us this: For justice to be delivered, the courtroom needs to be a safe space. In graphic detail Blowing hot and cold Over the past 10 days or so, you’ll have seen words like “sweltering”, “muggy”, “stifling” and “soaring” reappear in headlines across news platforms. And with good reason, the heat here in north India has truly been insufferable, though vast swathes of east (and even northeast) India seem to have it much worse, as an unusually hot summer spreads rapidly across the country. But then, western disturbances swept through parts of north and northwest India towards the end of week, bringing with them cooler winds and some rain and, all in all, much more liveable weather. As a result, for Delhi, April is likely to end on a much cooler note than it seemed initially. The Met department also predicted there will be no heatwave in most parts of the country in the coming five days, with heavy rainfall forecast for parts of Odisha, Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala between April 22 and 24. Just as well. Searing temperatures had begun to take their toll on people across the country, with illness arising out of heat spiking everywhere, and heat strokes at a mass gathering in Mumbai killing 14. Scores of people were attending a “Maharashtra Bhushan Award function” in an open ground at Kharghar in Navi Mumbai when the incident took place, underlining the lack of preparedness among authorities and event organisers to contend with shifting climatic conditions. Delhi’s weather itself has been characterised by oddities this year. A relatively warm February, followed by a wet March with rainfall three times the normal level, and then a topsy-turvy April. However, one interesting side-effect of this has been that butterfly enthusiasts have spotted butterfly species migrating to Delhi a month or two earlier than usual. But make no mistake – 2023 is likely to be a very hot year. All the predictions and analysis point towards it. India’s national Met office has also postulated that there is a “70% chance” of adverse weather patterns disrupting monsoon this year, which would have widespread consequences for not just the climate, but also agriculture and the economy. The weather pattern, an El Nino, is triggered by a warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and causes climate chaos across the globe and, often, drought in India. The India Met Department on April 14 said there is a 70% probability of El Nino in June, July and August and the probability rises to 80% in July, August and September. It may be time for that hillside WFH you’ve always planned. | 
