Argumentative Indians

A staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, the Yale law graduate has fought for the release of thousands of documents under the Freedom of Information Act and also investigated the alleged torture in American prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The latter brought a District Court ruling allowing release of photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that opened the gates for a full-blown investigation into how prisoners are treated. Amrit is married to an American.

8220;I tease her father that he has a diversified portfolio,8221; Professor Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University was quoted by The Wall Street Journal. 8220;He gets along with President Bush, while his daughter criticises him!8221;

Neal Katyal

He is undoubtedly the biggest 8220;anti-Bush administration legal luminary8221;, a league of his own for somebody who has been among the top 40 lawyers of the country. The National Law Journal, a legal Oscar of sorts, named Katyal the runner-up lawyer of the year. The best they picked: Katyal8217;s handling of Salim Hamdan8217;s US Supreme Court challenge to President Bush8217;s order establishing military commissions to try enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba. In a verdict that reverberated world over, the court held in a 5-3 vote that the military commissions violated military and international law.

Katyal, a Georgetown University Law Center professor, who made his first high court and Supreme Court appearance in Hamdan v Rumsfeld, says the credit goes collectively to current and retired military lawyers and a phalanx of loyal Georgetown and Yale Law School law students. 8220;Hamdan is simply the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law ever. Ever,8221; said former solicitor-general and Duke law professor Walter Dellinger.

An expert in national security law, the American Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and the role of the President and Congress post 9-11, Katyal forged a worldwide coalition of support for his challenge to the Guantanamo policy, including 422 members of the European and British Parliaments and several former generals and admirals of the United States Armed Forces. Particularly, he questioned the role of the President and Congress in time of war and theories of constitutional interpretation.

Katyal has served as National Security Adviser in the US Justice Department and was commissioned by President Clinton to write a report on the need for more legal pro bono work. He also served as Vice President Al Gore8217;s co-counsel in the Supreme Court election dispute of 2000, and represented the Deans of most major private law schools in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case that the Supreme Court decided last year.

Akhil Reed Amar

Katyal8217;s biggest influence in his legal career, however, may be another desi, constitutional scholar Akhil Amar Reed, who is a law professor at Yale.

Katyal took classes with Amar when he was at Yale and there are numerous reports where Katyal often refers to Amar8217;s citations on military tribunals. The two also published articles together in law review and political opinion journals in 1995 and 1996. Amar8217;s course on constitutional law is one of the most popular undergraduate offerings at Yale College.

Amar is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale College, the Yale Law School, where he got his JD in 1984 and was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Amar clerked for now-US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer when he was a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

In November, Amar joined forces with constitutional experts around the country to file a brief asking the First Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a District Court ruling and allow a lawsuit to move forward in an appeal by 12 military veterans battling the 8220;Don8217;t Ask, Don8217;t Tell8221; law prohibiting military service by lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans.

The brief argues that the law 8220;offends a fundamental right of personal autonomy8221; by forcing lesbian, gay and bisexual service members to not only be secret about a fundamental aspect of their identity but also affirmatively present themselves as heterosexual in public. The case will come up next year.

Manny Arora

In 2004, more than 49 Georgia convenience store owners and employees were charged with selling ingredients they allegedly knew would be used to make methamphetamines, a drug. Of the 49 individuals implicated, 47 are of Indian origin, with 33 Patels in the list, all from Gujarat. When the cases came up for hearing this year, only 10 were dismissed. Four were released and their 8220;illegal8221; status removed, all through the efforts of Indian-American attorney Manny Manubir Arora.

Most of those arrested were illegal workers and likely to be deported. Even those with green cards were likely to be deported if they pleaded guilty, after serving their sentence. Many, fearing lengthy jail sentences, entered into plea bargains to be deported. Arora, however, managed to get all his clients released.

Arora, 36, partner in Atlanta based law firm Garland, Samuel 038; Loeb, PC, was born in Jodhpur. He received his Bachelor8217;s Degree in Nuclear Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991 and his law degree from Georgia State University in 1994. He was admitted to the Georgia Bar in 1994, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces in 1994, the US District Court, Northern District of Georgia in 2001 and the US District Court, Middle District of Georgia in 2002.

Prior to entering private practice, Manny was a prosecutor for the US Air Force from 1994 to 1998, during which time he earned a nomination for top attorney in the United States Air Force. He has also worked in the major crimes homicide division.

Monami Maulik

Born in Kolkata, Maulik emigrated to the Bronx in New York as a child and is the most prominent desi voice for immigrant rights in the country. Her name is synonymous with the organisation DRUM 8212; Desis Rising Up and Moving 8212; which she co-founded in 1999. She organised dozens of immigrant rallies this year and has been a vociferous voice around the world for immigrants in detention and on the verge of being deported, especially in the wake of 9/11.

Maulik graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Third World Development Studies with minors in South Asian Studies and Women8217;s Studies from Cornell University in 1996. Before she founded DRUM 8211; which was the first low-income South Asian community-based organisation for social justice in the US 8211; she worked with New York taxi workers and women from Asian communities.

In 2001, she received the Union Square Award as co-founder of DRUM and the Open Society Institute Community Fellowship of the George Soros Foundation. In 2002, she received the Jane Bagely Lehman Award from the Tides Foundation in recognition of her work on immigrant rights and civil liberties post 9/11.

Maulik8217;s focus has been on the repercussion of the government8217;s enactment of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, after which the number of detainees under Immigration and Naturalization Service rose from 3,000 to 30,000. That service has now been disbanded and merged with the Department of Homeland Security.

Saru Jayaraman

Restaurant workers across New York City consider Saru Jayaraman as a leading force helping them regain not only their dignity against exploitative employers but also hefty compensation cheques.

A multi-talented personality 8212; she is a soprano who used to sing with a gospel choir at Harvard and has been honoured as one of America8217;s finest young people in 1995 by President Bill Clinton 8212; Jayaraman is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. At 17, she founded Women and Youth Supporting Each Other in 1992, a national non-profit organisation dedicated to working with young coloured women to become leaders in their communities.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, she, together with workers from Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, founded Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York ROC NY in 2002 to organise immigrant restaurant workers, particularly those displaced from the WTC and families of restaurant worker victims. She has a full-time job too, as professor of Political Science and Labour Law at Brooklyn College, Queens College, and New York University. Her biggest achievement this year 8212; opening of the restaurant, Colors, in Manhattan, the first cooperative restaurant owned and governed by workers.