To Be Or Not To Be?

Can a client instruct his lawyer or not?

He can.

Do the lawyer's personal preferences come into the picture at all?

No.

Then what was the CBI's lawyer, Gopal Subramaniam, protesting about when he resigned his brief upon being told by his client, the government of India, not to oppose bail for Mr Rao in the Lakhubhai-Rao case?

I have no doubt that Mr Subramaniam's heart is in the right place and that he only expressed the dismay he felt at what everyone has interpreted as being a needlessly Rao-friendly decision of the government.

Nevertheless, he had a duty as a lawyer as well, which he failed to discharge. In the current welter of circumstances, this duty may appear insignificant. But genuine professionals will agree that there is a problem here which Mr Subramaniam needs to resolve in the quiet privacy of his chambers.

Mr Subramaniam is not alone in having to face the problem which arises out a conflict between a specific professional ethic and the more general, moral ethics. For example:

Doctors face it when they have to cope with terminally ill patients: should they silently stop the support systems?

Civil servants face it when they have to carry out palpably immoral orders from their political bosses.

Sportsmen face it when, for purely tactical reasons in a league tournament, they have to deliberately lose a game.

Why, even my own tribe of journalists (often accused of having neither a professional nor a general ethic) faces it when the proprietor decides to do his friends a favour, never mind a few inconvenient facts.

Judges face it when they have to weigh a larger public issue against the merits of the case at hand. The two can, and do, pull in opposite directions.

There is obviously no easy way out. But, on balance, I suspect the professional ethics would have to come first and the moral dilemmas would have to be sorted out separately via quiet, not public, protest. Otherwise, there would be a justified charge of what the Americans call grandstanding.

Perhaps the only profession where professional ethics are wholly non-existent is politics. One reason for this could be that politics, although it has become a profession, is not yet regarded as one. So there is no one but the public to enforce an ethic and that cannot work except fitfully.

Another reason could be the nature of power itself. Acquiring it and exercising it effectively is, of necessity, morally neutral. The ends always justify the means.

In that sense, there is an inherent social problem for all those who are not interested in power, which is the majority. They will have to keep on wringing their hands in frustration.

But amorality in the acquisition and exercise of power is one thing. After all, it has been endorsed by all great, practical political thinkers like Chanakya, Machiavelli etc.

But amorality as a party creed is something else altogether. The Congress party is a perfect example of it. Its taking up of cudgels against the judiciary