You Are Assigned to Defend the Man Who Attacked Mumbai

The Lawyer Nobody Wanted to Be

Imagine you are a lawyer in Mumbai in 2009. The city is still grieving the attacks of 26 November 2008. One gunman survived and the court needs someone to defend him. You are appointed. Overnight, you become a "terrorist's lawyer".

In the film Prahaar, Abbas Kazmi describes the humiliation of exactly this: hostility from the public and even from his own community, his professional duty treated as a moral crime. In everyone else's eyes he has sinned.

In his own eyes and the law's, he is simply doing his job. Before reaching for any framework, sit with what each choice costs.

The cost of each path If you defend fully, you test every piece of the prosecution's evidence, challenge procedure where it is weak and argue for your client as hard as you would for anyone.

The price is your reputation, your standing in your community, perhaps your family's sense of safety. People will remember you as the man who stood beside a killer. If you refuse or defend half-heartedly, you spare yourself that cost.

But the trial loses its legitimacy. A verdict reached without a real defence can be attacked as a show trial, at home and abroad. And every future accused - including innocent ones - loses a little of the protection that a real defence provides.

The easy answer is that the lawyer should "do his duty". But that hides how much the duty costs the person who has to carry it.

What the

law says Indian law leaves no doubt. Article 22(1) gives every arrested person the right to be defended by a legal practitioner. Article 39A directs the State to provide free legal aid. Rule 11 of the Bar Council of India's rules binds advocates to accept briefs in the courts where they practise.

In A.S. Mohammed Rafi v. State of Tamil Nadu (2010), the Supreme Court declared resolutions by Bar Associations refusing to defend certain accused illegal and unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court upheld Kasab's death sentence in 2012, it noted that he had received a full and fair trial with legal aid.

That is what allowed India to present the verdict to the world as justice, not vengeance.

The resolution Defend fully. A duty that applies only to likeable clients is not a duty at all.

If lawyers could choose to defend only the sympathetic, the despised would have no defence and the line between a court and a mob would disappear. The cost must be named honestly: a lawyer who does this may lose friends, clients and standing and may face threats.

That cost should not fall on the lawyer alone. Bar associations, courts and the State have a duty to protect those who defend unpopular clients. This matters beyond one trial. When the public comes to see trials as obstacles, it begins to cheer shortcuts - mob violence, staged "encounters", punishment before proof.

A lawyer defending the most hated accused is not defending the crime. He is defending the idea that guilt must be proved.