Raju Ramachandran’s 14 lawyers: The Bar we had, the Bench we need

The remark and the judiciary’s reaction are part of a now familiar pattern, and it points to something larger than one bad month for the institution. It is the slow hollowing of the idea that the judiciary exists to hold power to account rather than to defer to it.

It is against this backdrop that I read Raju Ramachandran’s 14 Lawyers: Portraits from the Bar, which lands with unexpected timeliness. The book is, of course, not about the present crisis — it is a set of pen-portraits of lawyers, many now dead, who shaped the Supreme Court across earlier, difficult decades. But read today, it becomes a record of what the Bar looked like when it still understood itself as a check on power rather than an ornament to it.

Ramachandran’s subjects are not uniformly heroic, and the book is wiser for resisting hagiography. Frank Anthony’s defence of the “Indianness” of the English language, made to counter Hindi imposition in the Constituent Assembly, feels as relevant today as it did then. About the legendary Tehmtan Andhyarujina, Ramachandran’s anecdote from the Yakub Memon death penalty case is a reminder of what a stalwart of the Bar ought to be. Appearing for the Death Penalty Clinic (now the Square Circle Clinic), Andhyarujina, then an octogenarian, argued that the death warrant against Memon deserved to be quashed on procedural grounds. “I hope you know whom you are trying to save,” a judge remarked.

One imagines Andhyarujina did not flinch. One also imagines, sadly, that such a comment could today pass for the opening line of an opposing counsel’s argument. The book also profiles Justice V M Tarakunde, a former Bombay High Court judge who, after retirement, actively defended civil liberties during the Emergency. That Tarakunde could not reconcile with an old friend, Justice Y V Chandrachud, over the latter’s decision in the infamous ADM Jabalpur case, is testament to the fact that the political is, in the end, personal. Of lawyers Barry Sen and Lal Narayan Sinha, Ramachandran writes that they were so “mild-mannered” and “gentlemanly” that they would likely be overlooked today for a “senior” designation. This seemingly small, pointed detail serves as a quiet lesson for young lawyers, who might be tempted to turn a courtroom victory into an Instagram reel, that there is a difference between a better argument and a louder, or worse, viral one.

What emerges from these 14 portraits, finally, is not a lament for a golden age or a template for a good lawyer — Ramachandran is too careful a chronicler for that. The book is a reminder that the judiciary does not falter alone. It is held up or let down by the Bar that appears before it, argues before it, and, in its better moments, disciplines it by displaying sheer professional courage and competence. The silence of the Bench is often a direct consequence of the silence of the Bar.

Ask around in the corridors to hear stories of not finding counsel willing to make an inconvenient argument, or the difficulty in getting a senior for an “anti-national” brief. Those who speak up risk carrying partisan labels and, in any case, are few in number and are the same dozen. There is, of course, no dearth of lawyers for farewells, felicitations and high tea events to sing praises of judges, even those accused of corruption or sexual harassment. An institution does not erode in a single dramatic collapse but in small everyday capitulation.

There is much to gain in putting together the rich oral history of the Bar. These are stories of the greats, warnings and humorous lessons that, I suppose, are ever so slightly embellished every time a senior retells them. This book does that very well, without the embellishments. It offers a glimpse of what the Bar could be.