CHENNAI: Ideally, as an Allahabadi (though his father Vishwamitra started his law practice in Meerut in 1916), eminent Constitutional lawyer and former Union Law Minister in the erstwhile Janata Government, Shanti Bhushan, would have preferred to go by the sagely advice of poet Akbar Alllahabadi.
The poet, as Shanti Bhushan says in his recent additional memoir, ‘My Second Innings’, as an unavoidable sequel to his earlier acclaimed autobiography, ‘Courting Destiny’, “had once said that an autobiography should be written in just nine words.” The first memoir had been released by late Somnath Chatterjee on Shanti Bhushan’s 83rd birthday on November 11, 2008.
The poet’s cryptic words went like this: ‘BA hue, naukar hue, pension mili, phir mar gaye’, which Bhushan translates as, “Got the BA degree, got a job, got pension and then died.” Even the English translation of those lyrical nine words of Akbar Allahabadi has exceeded by three!
“I should have just listened to the poet….but, however it is now too late,” says the author as the solid lawyer in him still rocks at 93. Several important things of major significance happened in the Indian political scene in the last ten years that Shanti Bhushan could not resist this sequel, more so as a famous lawyer who got the great Mrs Indira Gandhi unseated in the election petition filed by Raj Narayan way back in 1975. Though, in terms of being a writer, it was his son Prashant Bhushan who first became famous with his book, “The Case that shook India”, when a series of books related to the Emergency and after burst on the scene.
Apart from the fact that he played an “important role” in some “epoch-making cases in the Supreme Court” during the past decade, Shanti Bhushan now writes that what inspired him to think of a “second innings” being possibly more fruitful than his “first innings” was the incredible India-Australia Test match in March 2001. In that Test, India, after going under in the first innings, pulled off an out-of-the-world victory from the jaws of defeat by a staggering second innings score of 657 for only 7 wickets- “thanks to the batting of VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid”- and then bowling out the Australians in their second innings for a meagre 212 runs to win that Test by 171 runs!
True to that spirit, Shanti Bhushan has not failed his readers in this extended memoir. It is a robust mix of some earlier memories from the Bhushan family’s ancestral home taking shape in Allahabad - next in size only to Motilal Nehru’s ‘Anand Bhavan’ - to incisive, ringside view of the judiciary itself. Despite his anti-establishment leaps, Shanti Bhushan has shown how a simple, effective and clear use of language, backed by cogent, sturdy arguments brings out the underlying drama and pathos of law, justice and life at large, which in effect makes this memoir also a document for students of Law and Humanities.
Juxtaposed between these are some of the big cases he has been involved with professionally as a lawyer, like Lalu Yadav corruption case. He takes head-on some contentious issues within the higher judiciary itself including appointment of judges; last but not least the author’s full involvement in both phases of the ‘Anna Andolan’ (April 4-9, 2011, second phase from August 2011), his role in formulating the first draft of what was to become the ‘Jan Lokpal Bill’ taking shape at the India International Centre in Delhi, emergence of the former Army man and Gandhian Anna Hazare as an anti-corruption crusader from Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra, and the dramatic sequels from Jantar Mantar fasts (an idea that caught on later with our veteran Tamil Nadu farmers’ leader Ayyakannu) to Ram Lila Maidan in Delhi, leading to the final passage of the ‘Lokpal’ Bill by Dr Manmohan Singh-led UPA government, have all been delectably captured with an insider’s authority and eye for detail by Shanti Bhushan.
However, despite ‘Team Anna’, which then included new political stars like Arvind Kejriwal and Dr Kiran Bedi, dubbing the Congress’ ‘Lokpal’ bill as a ‘weak Lokpal’, the author’s “inside story” also takes pot-shots at some of the top guns then in the UPA government when the government’s Lokpal Bill was drafted.
The ‘Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’, as the political wing of the ‘Anna Andolan’, gave rise to new hopes, but subsequent attitudinal change in Mr. Kejriwal came as a big blow to AAP. This regress virtually disillusioned Shanti Bhushan as he has been “fighting all my life” for clean and transparent governance at all levels.
Nonetheless, there is no effort by Shanti Bhushan in these pages to critique the ‘Anna Andolan’, its presuppositions, or its structural weaknesses. But the author throws enough hints in this memoir that the fight will go on through ‘Swaraj Abhyan’, the breakaway AAP that includes social scientists like Yogendra Yadav.
One insightful observation Shanti Bhushan makes in this context is that Congress could have reaped the fallout of the ‘Anna Andolan’ if only Rahul Gandhi had openly endorsed Anna’s call at the key Delhi rally. On the contrary, it was the BJP, the author says, which was non-committal on the Lokpal Bill at that stage, took all the electoral dividends in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The message from Shanti Bhushan’s story is that seizing the moral high ground by itself is not politics.
The author recalling an “Undelivered letter which resulted in the declaration of Emergency in India in June 1975”, is much more than a historical footnote to the momentous Raj Narayan’s election case against the late Mrs. Gandhi, for it points to how seemingly little, intricate happenings in the heat of a battle can change the course of even the country’s destiny. The case, inadvertently, as Shanti Bhushan notes, changed the fate of another leading lawyer Ram Jethmalani too.
Shanti Bhushan’s interactions with prominent leaders including J Jayalalithaa - he appeared for her to win the AIADMK office property case in Supreme Court though he later declined to appear in the corruption case against her - are anecdotal delights. His tribute to late Justice VR Krishna Iyer, is truly
touching.
