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ON THE EVENING OF 5 SEPTEMBER, a fleet of sedans rolled into Delhi’s Teen Murti Estate, the former home of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The number of cars and people that had gathered there prompted the security guard to ask me if it was true that more than four hundred people were attending. The occasion was one of the glitziest events for the capital’s legal fraternity in recent months. Inside, the auditorium’s seats had been taken by the country’s elite lawyers and retired judges. Many junior advocates, law interns and students thronged at the back, milling around the doors or trying to find a spot to sit on the floor. As the two main dignitaries arrived, lawyers young and old reached out for handshakes, whispered conversations and photos. The chief guest, Uday Umesh Lalit, the former chief justice of India, and the guest of honour, Mahesh Jethmalani, the son of Ram Jethmalani—once India’s wealthiest lawyer—were here to meet old friends and tend to old family legacies.
The event was organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, established in 1992 as the lawyers’ wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Today, the ABAP has grown into perhaps the largest organisation of lawyers across India. The organisation’s activities have received a boost in the past decade thanks to the dominance of the Sangh’s political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in the last three general elections. During the tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the RSS has seen many of its long-held dreams come to fruition, whether it was the creation of a Ram temple at the site of Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid—demolished by a Hindutva mob the year the ABAP was established—or the abrogation of Article 370, which accorded special status to Jammu and Kashmir. Many of the Sangh’s victories were aided by a pliant judiciary. The ABAP’s rise to prominence, in high society as well as in the thousands of district and trial courts across the country, through an ever-expanding network of study circles, strategic litigation and personal connections, has been one of the Hindu Right’s most persevering, tactical expansions.
The event the ABAP was hosting was a celebration for lawyers who had recently been designated senior advocates of the Supreme Court. Among the 39 designates, 30 were in attendance, including the BJP’s member of parliament Bansuri Swaraj, Indra Sawhney, whose petition resulted in the Supreme Court’s fifty-percent ceiling for reservations, and Aparna Bhat, who has represented many survivors of gender-based violence in courts. “We have invited over forty new seniors, irrespective of their ideology,” an ABAP executive member associated with the event told me. The event was also, in part, a regular meeting of the ABAP’s “study circle”—the key note for this edition, on the three new criminal codes, was addressed by Lalit and Jethmalani. At a stall, attendees entered their phone numbers into a register and picked up free copies of ABAP’s subscription-only quarterly magazine, Nyayapravah. The cover of one of the magazine issues splashed the text “Uniform Civil Code – Need of the Nation.”