What helps AG Vahanvati retain his job?
Jay Bhattacharjee
August 30, 2013
In the interest of transparency, this disclosure has to be made here and now. Goolam Vahanvati, the country’s Attorney-General, the highest law officer of the Union Government, whose post is stipulated and defined in the Constitution itself, caught my attention during the Supreme Court hearing of General VK Singh’s petition in January and February 2012. Before that, I had heard the usual corridor gossip in the National capital about him and his chequered background, but I had not paid too much attention to the swirling rumours.
There were two reasons why I started studying the man and his actions.
The first was that the former Chief of Army Staff (COAS) was a person I admired enormously, a soldiers’ soldier, if there had ever been one, in recent times. In my opinion, the legendary Sam Bahadur would have been the first to sayshabash to the good VKS. The second one was that the COAS, in my view (and that of millions of my fellow citizens) was clearly the victim of an insidious and Machiavellian conspiracy engineered and instigated by some people in the highest circles in the land. The legal stand of General VKS, buttressed by the considered opinions of four former Chief Justices of India and every relevant documentation (except one irrelevant and inapplicable piece of paper that came to haunt the valiant soldier 40 years after someone else wrote it), seemed unassailable to me. That was, of course, before Janaab Vahanvati stepped into the ring.
Using every trick in the lawyers’ trade, he argued against the COAS in the Apex Court, deliberately ignoring clear and unambiguous judgements of the same Court on what constitutes a person’s legally-acceptable date of birth. In the eyes of the law and the facts of the case, the date of birth of VKS was indisputably May 10, 1951. However, Vahanvati threw out all law and jurisprudence and adopted a notoriously outlandish stand that the DOB of VKS must stay as May 10, 1950, because, otherwise, the line of succession already decided for the next COAS would be affected.
Vahanvati won the day in Tilak Marg while the country, as well as its jurisprudence system, lost. The fact that Justice Lodha and Justice Gokhale allowed Vahanvati and the Union of India (read the UPA Government) to get away with this crime is another story. As one senior commentator in the nation’s 4th Estate put it, this is yet another decision of the Supreme Court that will haunt it in the years to come.
However, since then, I have been tracking Vahanvati and looking at his peccadilloes. His various sins of commission and omission add up to a list that is longer than the proverbial nine yards.
This is before the latest brouhaha with the CPI MP, Gurudas Dasgupta.
[MP accuses top legal official of holding Swiss bank account:
My efforts to monitor him have, of course, been greatly assisted by the steadfast and dedicated research conducted by a few other commentators. Before we proceed further, it would be appropriate to look at what the Constitution says about the role and duties of the Attorney-General (AG).
Article 76 of the Constitution provisions pertaining to the AG of the country. It is a short Article and basically lays down the broad contours of the functions and duties of the AG. It is the President (read the Government of the day) who appoints the AG, who has to be qualified to be appointed as a Judge of the Supreme Court. The AG is duty- bound to “give advice to the Government of India upon such legal matters , and to perform such other duties of a legal character, as may from time to time be referred or assigned to him by the President, and to discharge the functions conferred on him by or under this Constitution or any other law for the time being in force”.
Now, this is the crux of the issue. The AG, as the principal law officer of the Republic, has a fiduciary and moral responsibility to follow the Constitution and the law when he carries out his job. The founding parents of our Republic were persons, by and large, of great sagacity and wisdom, quite unlike many of their successors in recent times. When the office of the AG was incorporated in the Constitution, the idea was to follow the American example and enable the Union Government to obtain legal opinion that is not tainted by narrow political or party considerations. The AG, quite rightly, was visualised as the guardian of public interest.
Judged by this fundamental criterion, AG Vahanvati has failed miserably on every count. The least of his shenanigans involved a conflict of interest with his son’s law firm, but on a larger backdrop, this was a minor infraction. A bagatelle by the standards of this man’s other indiscretions. His penchant for reversing his opinions given officially to the GOI within a span of a few years is also well known in the capital. In a case pertaining to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the AG did an about turn in August 2011 on his earlier opinion given in February 2007, when he was the Solicitor General, which is the second senior-most legal position in the Union Government.
Then there is the well-known case related to UP supremo Mulayam Singh’s alleged disproportionate assets. Here, again the Union Government performed a series of devious twists and turns that would have done a circus artiste proud. Whenever the Centre wanted Mulayam to do a favour, the case was revived from cold storage. As soon as Mulayam toed the line, it would be put back in limbo. AG Vahanvati was, as you have guessed, the legal brain behind these gymnastics. In November 2008, Goolam babu came up with an outrageous legal opinion to justify the closure of the case against Mulayam. He deliberately blurred the distinction between prosecution or trial proceedings and investigation proceedings. According to the most respected legal luminaries in the country, Vahanvati’s opinion was moonshine. Not only was it most dubious, but it also set some very unhealthy precedents for future cases of corruption and acquisition of assets disproportionate to one’s means.
However, our man’s stellar performances were yet to come. His role in the Coalgate scam is now public knowledge. Here, he was cruelly exposed before the Supreme Court bench monitoring the case, but he nevertheless saw it fit to sacrifice his immediate junior law officer, the Additional Solicitor General, Harin Raval. In his resignation letter that is now public, Raval wrote to Vahanvati: “It has constantly pained and anguished me that I have had to face unnecessary indignation on account of your intolerant temperament towards the conscientious discharge of duties especially in high profile cases. I have held you in great esteem as leader of our team but your flip flop attitude towards me has always put me under unnecessary pressure.”
Before this cruel exposé hit him, Vahanvati had to confront the ignominious disclosures about his far-from-kosher role in the 2G scandal. He brushed these off like water flowing on a seal’s back. Not only did he keep his job but he seemed to be progressing effortlessly in the Raisina Hill pecking order.
Now comes his latest contretemps with the CPI MP Dasgupta. There are various versions of the letter written by the MP to the Prime Minister floating around in Delhi’s media and salon circles. And no doubt in the western metropolis and elsewhere. I doubt that that many people have actually seen the letter.
The relevant question therefore is – what is it that makes Vahanvati so pathologically scared about the letter’s contents ? Scared to the extent of having a legal notice issued to the MP. Has Vahanvati forgotten his basic Constitutional Law, something he must have learnt in his first year LLB course ?
In any case, his catalogue of mischief and offences is now so humongous that his protectors will have to show him the door soon. Even then, there will be many who will ask why he was not ejected much earlier.
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