By even the most basic definition, lawyers are expected to provide their clients with competent legal representation and advice and act in their best interests. By extension, then, they can be considered responsible for maintaining public confidence in a country's legal system and ensuring its integrity. In the discharge of their professional duties it behoves lawyers, whether in the lower courts or the highest court in the land, to observe a minimum decorum. On the evidence of the last few days' unedifying spectacle at the Patiala House trial court, it is doubtful whether some of them can admit to this fundamental understanding of their obligations. The manner in which some of them were seen attacking a student leader and journalists on the court premises made it difficult to distinguish the lawyers from the average neighbourhood lumpen. The fact that the miscreants flaunted their allegiance to the party ruling at the Centre and participated in a havoc-wreaking spree with an MLA from the same party showed that they placed little credence on the unbiased nature of their profession.
The violent lawyers also exhibited a frightening ignorance of the basics of law. Could they have any legal basis to pronounce Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union President Kanhaiya Kumar guilty of sedition before the arguments were heard in court? More to the point, their violence has disrupted the functioning of the legal system to the extent that Mr Kumar's legal team deemed it inadvisable for their client to go back to the same court for a bail application. It is possible that this particular group of lawyers felt strongly about Mr Kumar's so-called misdeed or journalists' biases. But if they had paid attention at law school, they would have been aware that the route to address their grievance is embedded within the judicial system within which they should function - just as journalists express their opinions through the medium of the channels, newspapers and magazines they represent.
The issue also points to a disturbing erosion of values within the judicial system. In some form or the other, lawyer misbehaviour bordering on the kind of lawlessness that was on display outside the Patiala House courts is rampant within the lower echelons of judiciary in many parts of India. In 2012, for instance, lawyers belonging to the Janata Dal (S) of the City Civil Court in Bengaluru were seen attacking journalists, who were covering former minister G Janardhan Reddy's court case involving serious irregularities by his mining company. The resulting clash destroyed court property and injured many policemen. In Hyderabad last year, advocates from Telangana disrupted proceedings as part of a rally organised by the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti demanding a separate high court for the newly formed state. The second element of this decline is the overt politicisation of the legal system so that the terms of engagement between the legal system and citizenry have been steadily vitiated. The upshot is a steady erosion of quality; few who want to practise law as a vocation choose to enter the field of litigation, still less become judges. It is disturbing to think that the miscreants at the Patiala House Courts could be tomorrow's senior judges.
Part of the problem is the pusillanimous response to lawless lawyers by the Bar Councils concerned and the police. It is baffling that they were able to disrupt, with impunity, traffic and law and order in the capital city for three days in a row with their antics whereas Mr Kumar, whose alleged crime took place within the grounds of a university, was so swiftly arrested on evidence that is yet to be established. Or that the bar council has not looked into the conduct of such lawyers and considered punishing them for blatant breach of law. The prime minister recently exhorted multinationals to invest in India and discover the "potential" of its people. The last few days displayed a good reason why they may hesitate to do so.
