Mukul Rohatgi , 67, a lawyer known for his unvarnished arguments and breviloquent submissions is set to return as India’s Attorney General from October 1.
Also Read:Mukul Rohatgi set to become Attorney General again
This will be Rohatgi’s second stint as the top law officer of the country. The BJP-led NDA government chose him as AG soon after it came to power in 2014. He remained in office till 2017 before veteran lawyer KK Venugopal took over. Venugopal’s third
Mukul Rohatgi , 67, a lawyer known for his unvarnished arguments and breviloquent submissions is set to return as India’s Attorney General from October 1.
Also Read:Mukul Rohatgi set to become Attorney General again
This will be Rohatgi’s second stint as the top law officer of the country. The BJP-led NDA government chose him as AG soon after it came to power in 2014. He remained in office till 2017 before veteran lawyer KK Venugopal took over. Venugopal’s third extension as AG ends on September 30.
The son of a former Delhi High Court judge, Rohatgi, 67, was designated senior counsel in 1993 and was later appointed as an additional Solicitor General in 1999. His first term at the Centre’s law office ended with the change of government in May 2004. In his capacity as the ASG during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee led NDA government, Rohatgi represented the government in the Supreme Court in the 2002 Gujarat riots and fake encounter cases.
Following a flourishing private practice in the Supreme Court and high courts of Delhi and Bombay, Rohatgi agreed to become the Modi government’s first AG when a challenge to the National Judicial Appointment Commission (NJAC) was raging in the top court.
Rohatgi could not succeed in defending the law but he certainly did create flutters in the court with his frequent attacks on the collegium system of appointing judges, without mincing words while the arguments in the case ensued in 2015. He even told the five judges on the bench that the collegium worked on a “You scratch my back and I will scratch yours” principle. Rohatgi went ahead and submitted a 10-page list of names which were pushed by the collegium despite concerns flagged by adverse Intelligence Bureau reports and critical comments by its own judges -- but to no avail.
The next big case Rohatgi appeared for the Centre was the Aadhaar one, in which the senior lawyer once again made the headlines by arguing that an individual does not have absolute authority over their body and there was no recognised right to privacy under the Constitution. His statement changed the course of the case completely and a nine-judge bench had to be set up to decide the nature of privacy rights. More than 700 days after Rohatgi’s astonishing statement, the matter was finally settled with the constitution bench unanimously ruling in August 2017 that privacy is a fundamental right in India. However, when the matter was being finally argued in the top court, it was Rohatgi’s successor KK Venugopal who faced the formidable row of nine judges.
Some big triumphs of Rohatgi as AG came when he led the arguments on behalf of the Centre in seeking the invalidation of triple talaq, defending the validity of the criminal defamation law and challenging criminal prosecution of security forces’ personnel over alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur and playing of the national anthem before movies in theatres.
After his tenure as AG, Rohatgi became an in-demand lawyer, representing state governments, politicians, industrialists, big business houses and individuals fighting for liberty.
In 2018, the Maharashtra government appointed Rohatgi as the special prosecutor in the judge BH Loya death case, in which he successfully secured a clean chit for the state government. He also represented the Maharashtra government in its bid to defend the Maratha quota law, which was eventually held to be unconstitutional. He has also appeared for the governments of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh .
Rohatgi appeared for Balwant Singh Rajoana, a convict in former Punjab chief minister Beant Singh’s assassination case, to argue for Rajoan’s remission. He successfully represented journalists Arnab Goswami and Rajdeep Sardesai, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, comic artist Rachita Taneja, Amazon Prime (India) creative head Aparna Purohit, in cases relating to hate speech and hurting religious sentiments.
Rohatgi has routinely appeared for Facebook and WhatsApp before the Supreme Court and Delhi high court where a clutch of challenges pertaining to various policies of the government are currently pending.
Rohatgi recently appeared for former Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren, former Karnataka CM BS Yediyurappa, Shiromani Akali Dal leader Bikram Singh Majithia, former Delhi Police commissioner Rakesh Asthana, former Mumbai police commissioners Parambir Singh and Sanjay Pandey, real estate barons Sushil and Gopal Ansal, the Future Group in the Amazon Vs Future saga. He also secured bail for Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan in a drugs raid case.
The senior counsel loves travelling and is a proud owner of a fleet of super cars. He is an art connoisseur and his personal collection includes paintings by several famous artists including XXXXXX, XXXXXX and XXXXX. Rohatgi enjoys historical books, besides light thrillers by authors such as Jeffrey Archer.
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