Subramaniam was presented the Kerala Lawyers' Club's Pirappancode Sreedharan Nair Award, comprising a cash prize of Rs one lakh and a memento, by CPI(M) veteran and opposition leader V S Achuthanandan at a function here.
"I am giving back the cash cheque of Rs one lakh to the Club itself. They can use this to institute a scholarship for law students in the state," Subramaniam, who now serves as amicus curiae in the Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple case, said.
"Legal practitioners should stand for the cause of poor and downtrodden. We should see Justice Iyer as model in this. He had compassion for poor. He was a man of stark simplicity and exceptional intelligence," he said.