ONCE CONGRESS HAD LAWYERS LIKE GANDHI
On an April evening in 1917, a lawyer named Vallabhbhai Patel was playing bridge at the Gujarat Club in Ahmedabad. This was, for him, a routine affair; every day, after his work at the Bar ended, he headed straight for the card table. This evening in April 1917 was different. Earlier in the day, in distant Bihar, another Gujarati lawyer had been detained for refusing to obey an official order to leave Champaran.
As the historian David Hardiman writes, when the news of Gandhi’s defiance of the British Raj reached Ahmedabad, “the legal fraternity at the Gujarat Club leapt to their feet”, and decided to have this “brave man” as the next President of their Sabha.
No one was more moved by the news than Vallabhbhai Patel. Indeed, he quit his law practice shortly afterwards; and for the next 30 years worked alongside Gandhi, helping him build the Congress, plan and execute various movements of civil disobedience, and in other ways help advance the movement for freedom from colonial rule. Before Patel, Gandhi had himself abandoned a prosperous legal practice to work fulltime for the Indian community in South Africa. Their renunciation is well known; yet it came to mind when I read of two senior Congress leaders, both former ministers, serving as counsel for the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). And it came to mind again when I heard that another Congress leader, a serving member of Parliament, was acting as the lead counsel for the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) in the Sabarimala case.
The AIMPLB and the TDB represent the most reactionary elements in their respective communities. Both are implacably opposed to equal rights for women. And yet, while Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi talk often of how their party stands for full gender equality, their own former ministers and serving MPs appear in the Supreme Court arguing that Indian women, Muslim as well as Hindu, should be denied various kinds of rights promised them by the Constitution. What are the words one might use to describe this kind of behaviour? ‘Opportunistic’ is one. ‘Hypocritical’ is a second. ‘Cynical’ is a third. Whichever epithet one finally chooses, one thing is clear; that the conduct at the Bar of these various leading Congressmen is in contemptuous violation of the history and legacy of the Indian National Congress.
Gandhi and Patel were not alone in turning their back on legal practice when they joined politics. Other patriots across India did likewise. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was as successful a lawyer in Tamil Nadu as Patel was in Gujarat or Gandhi in South Africa.
When he joined the freedom movement, Rajaji left behind his practice too. However, in one exceptional case he returned to the court, as narrated below.
In 1925, a Dalit entered a temple at Tiruchanur, close to Tirupati. The temple authorities filed a case against him, as their holy scriptures prevented Dalits from entering a shrine meant for caste Hindus alone. The charge was upheld by a judge who shared the prejudices of the temple authorities.
When he read a report of this injustice, Rajaji was outraged, and temporarily abandoned his vow of “non co-operation” with the colonial justice system to appear on behalf of the victimised Dalit. As he wrote to a friend, the persecution Udayan’s flow fluently. Few people who know him from his CNBC days would have guessed he had such emotional depths.
The other surprise is his delightful use of the English language. Describing the moment dusk turns to night in the Uttarakhand hills, he writes: “In the distance, the lights of Almora were slowly beginning to come on. Soon, they would begin to look like a swarm of distant fireflies.” I don’t recall the Udayan I knew talking in such evocative terms.
In fact, the misty mountain sunshine of the Uttarakhand hills is perhaps the only light in this book. It is a sad, dark story but one that forces you to think and feel as you get drawn deeper into it. I read it in one sitting. The book captured my attention completely. and prosecution of this devout Dalit “took me out of the mechanical groove of doctrine”. Through his arguments in court, Rajaji persuaded the judge to overturn his original verdict and have the Dalit acquitted.
By this time, Gandhi himself had not practised law for over a decade. The only occasions on which he had recently been in court had been as a convicted satyagrahi. However, he entirely approved of what his disciple had done. As Gandhi put it, Rajaji “would have been like a Pharisee if he had sat there still, gloating over the sanctimonious satisfaction of non-cooperating, while the accused could have been discharged by his intervention”.
Like Gandhi, Patel, and Rajaji, Jawaharlal Nehru gave up the law to join the freedom strug-
Late that night, when I finished, I felt both sad and bereft. The first emotion was because I had been completely engrossed by the book’s tragic story. The second because I was sorry it had finished. It had dominated the last few hours and I felt a little lonely when I turned the last page.
I’m not a literary critic so I don’t know how Dark Circles will fare. Sometimes reviewers are so determined to make literary statements or simply show off they can forget the book itself. I can’t. It’s powerful and unusual, so different to anything I have read. So unlike the television anchor I worked with a decade ago. At the time I would have glibly said Udayan doesn’t have emotions. I would never have thought he could feel them so keenly or express them with such force.
Now I await his next book. I wonder how much more it will reveal of the man I never really knew? But of one thing I feel certain, his days of television anchoring and newspaper column writing will inevitably give way to the novelist that has just emerged.We are, I feel certain, on the threshold of discovering a new Udayan Mukherjee. gang Schaeuble, who went as far as criticising it for the rise of extremist parties in Germany.
It is possible that a different German leader would have acted more decisively in supporting euro-zone reform or in explaining to voters why a stronger monetary union is in their interest. In the last year, Merkel paid lip service to French president Emmanuel Macron’s grand plan to reform Europe, but has done little to support him.
But in German politics, there’s little evidence that pushing for greater European federalism pays off. Martin Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament and a well-known federalist, lost the 2017 elections badly, with the Social Democratic Party slumping to a post-war low. Conversely, the right-wing, eurosceptic Alternative for Germany party has made considerable gains — limiting the scope for Merkel’s Christian Democrats to press for euro-zone reform.
The one exception is the Green Party, which is open to the idea of Eurobonds, something that could entail some form of debt mutualisation. So there is some hope for the euro zone after Merkel. But with Italy on collision course with Brussels, and Macron looking weak at home, the stars aren’t aligning for a federalist leap in Germany. A more selfish and insular Germany is a distinct possibility. Many in southern Europe could come to regret the woman they despised. November 5: North Vietnamese troops launched their heaviest ground attacks in two months, as US President Richard Nixon warned that "Hanoi could make no greater mistake than to assume that an increase in violence will be to its advantage." gle. Unlike them, he was never very successful at the Bar. Yet it is noteworthy that the one time he donned lawyer’s robes as a serving Congressman, it was to defend soldiers of the Indian National Army whom the British Raj had charged with “treason”. As with Rajaji, an exception was made for a worthy cause.
One would have absolute respect for Congress ex-ministers and serving MPs if they either (a) entirely gave up private practice and focused on politics; (b) entirely gave up politics and focused on private practice. One would respect them too, if they remained in politics and took up only those briefs that resonated with the values and ideals of the Constitution their party claims to uphold.
Yet, where the likes of Rajaji went back to the Bar to fight for equal rights for Dalits, the Congress lawyers of today appear repeatedly on behalf of groups that seek to deny women equal rights.
When I first tweeted about the hypocrisy of these Congressmen, their apologists claimed that the code of the Bar Council mandated that they take any brief offered to them. I checked with learned scholars of the Bar who confirmed that this was not the case. Senior counsels, which is what these men are, are not obliged to take briefs if they don’t wish to. That they do is a sign of their hypocrisy, opportunism, or worse. It is also a sign of how far removed Rahul Gandhi’s Indian National Congress is from the party of the same name that ex-lawyers like Mahatma Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari once so honourably served.
THE MISTY MOUNTAIN SUNSHINE OF THE UTTARAKHAND HILLS IS PERHAPS THE ONLY LIGHT IN THE BOOK. IT IS A SAD, DARK STORY THAT CAPTURED MY ATTENTION COMPLETELY