Kapil Sibal: Legal heavyweight in politics

Kapil Sibal has been a lawyer for more than 40 years and still remembers the day he fought — and lost — his first case. He got his first brief, an election petition of a politician from Meham in Haryana. The politician had contested an election and won, switching sides after doing so — but the election was set aside on eight counts.

 

One of these was that he had bribed one of the candidates into withdrawing from the contest. A few weeks earlier, judge J Bhagwati had passed an order that if a bribe was offered by one candidate to another, the election would be held null and void. Sibal was asked why the petition should even be heard. He replied that the judgment was wrong, arguing that even if his client might have offered a bribe, it was not as a candidate, for one becomes a candidate only after the nomination is found valid. The Supreme Court heard the case for 20 days. Bhagwati wrote an opinion and Sibal lost the case. Later, he says, he figured why — one of the judges was retiring after hearing this case and while the other two (it was a three-judge bench) disagreed with his opinion, they did not want to oppose him in his last case.

 

Today, Sibal’s client is a lawyer. And, Sibal is a politician. Between then and now, Sibal has represented many politicians: Jayalalithaa, in the coal import case; K Karunakaran, Bhajan Lal, the Akali Dal (in the last instance in Sukhbir Badal’s controversial hotel purchase case) and Lalu Prasad.

 

It was thanks to Prasad that Sibal became a Rajya Sabha member in the 1990s, when Prasad directed party MLAs in the Bihar Assembly to transfer surplus votes to Sibal, a Congress candidate, in return for fighting his case in the fodder scam. Sibal defended Supreme Court judge V Ramaswamy during the latter’s impeachment in Parliament. His performance caught the eye of then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, who offered him the South Delhi seat in the 1996 Lok Sabha election. Sibal lost by a margin of over 100,000. The offer from Lalu Prasad for the Rajya Sabha came in 1998. By then, he had tasted blood and decided to contest the Lok Sabha election from Chandni Chowk, Delhi, in 2004, which he won.

 

Sibal is broadly left of centre, and is in the Congress because he believes all Indians must contest the Hindu nation theory. He feels the Supreme Court judgment justifying suspension of Articles 21 and 21 relating to personal liberty — legal bedrock for the imposition of the Emergency — was flawed. He feels the law is inevitably one step behind change — and to that extent is status quoist. But, he himself detests status quo. He was disowned by the Sunni Waqf Board for his argument that the Babri Masjid case must be heard after the next general election.

 

“Now that the Sunni Waqf Board has said that they don’t agree with what Kapil Sibal said in court, it is certain that Sibal spoke in his capacity as a Congress leader, with the blessings of their high command. Shameful posturing by Congress on Ram Temple issue!” said BJP President Amit Shah. Sibal is unlikely to let this faze him. Winning cases is what a lawyer does and Sibal is trying to do just that.