An open letter to Mr.Justice Deepak Gupta, Chairperson of the High Power Committee SCI monitoring the verification of advocates.

26th December 2023

To,
Mr. Justice Deepak Gupta
The Hon’ble Chairperson
High Power Committee of the Supreme Court of India
Vide Ajay Shankar Srivastava v. Bar Council of India & Anr.

Respected Mr.Justice,

According to the judgment in Ajay Shankar Srivastava v. Bar Council of India & Anr. [2023] 6 SCR 505 we the public are given to believe that this High Power Committee set up by the Supreme Court of India, of which you are the Chairperson, is to monitor the process of verification of advocates. You and your team of 7 members have also been afforded the liberty to issue guidelines and directions “to ensure that the process of verification is duly carried out”. Additionally all State Bar Councils have been directed to follow your directions and report compliance.

Your committee, as you must be aware of, is an iteration of another committee with a similar mandate instituted in Ajayinder Sangwan & Ors. v. Bar Council of Delhi & Ors. [2017] 7 SCR 666. Even though I am hit by déjà vu, and maybe particularly because of it, I see you and your committee as offering up another opportunity. A second chance, might you will, to set in place a process that will actually weed out fake advocates.

I feel compelled to write at this moment in time since the Congress government, where I currently reside, has just passed ‘The Karnataka Prohibition of Violence Against Advocates Bill, 2023’. The stated objective being to protect Advocates against “the threat of malicious and frivolous prosecution by the rival parties” carried out with the intention “to interfere with the performance of their duties, in turn interfering with the administration of justice itself.” The bill, passed by both the houses, prohibits any violence against an Advocate making it a criminal offence that is cognizable and punishable with a prison term of 6 months to 3 years including/or a fine. The bill has turned a non-cognizable offence i.e. of “criminal intimidation” defined by S.503 of the Indian Penal Code into a cognizable one.

The passing of this bill is relevant to the remit prescribed for your committee since it defines an Advocate as meaning someone who is enrolled and “holding a valid certificate of practice issued by the Karnataka State Bar Council as defined under rule 4 of the Bar Council of India Certificate and Place of Practice (Verification) Rules, 2015” What you do or omit to do now will decide the life and liberty of what constitutes the “public” in Karnataka and as such imposes on you and your committee an ethical and moral obligation. This is in light of the documents I possess obtained through the Right to Information Act, 2005 from the Karnataka State Bar Council that clearly show that the verification process of advocates has been compromised.

What is also extremely pertinent to point out is that there seems to be an understanding as found in the judgment in Ajay Shankar Srivastava that those who have not submitted their verification forms are likely to be fake. The judgment states that “The Bar Council of India apprehends that many advocates who have not submitted their forms for verification are persons who are not qualified or are “in possession of fake degrees”. As such the remit of the committee seems to be getting circumscribed to the monitoring of verification forms submitted after Ajay Shankar Srivastava. I find this extremely dangerous, as I shall illustrate further along how documents obtained through the RTI show that the verification process of advocates who submitted their forms before Ajay Shankar Srivastava is compromised.  
 With that in mind I write you this open letter. Might I be audacious enough to suggest a few important tweaks to the process from the vantage point of being a litigant, for more than a decade, in the legal redressal dispensing system. Might I solicit your time and your patience and present to you my (and my family’s) four-year relentless unfruitful attempt at trying to follow a complaint process (or what we are laboriously educated in as “procedure established by law”) against two fake advocates practicing in the courts in Karnataka.

Evidence of Earlier Fraudulent Verifications

In late 2019 and early 2020 my sister made applications under the Right to Information Act seeking information and documents concerning the enrollment and verification of two advocates – G.A.Srikante Gowda and his colleague M.Amaranatha who have been verified and entered into the Karnataka State Bar Council’s [KSBC] Bangalore electoral roll in 2018. The information and documents received prima facie indicate that both are fraudulently enrolled advocates whose defective verification forms were pushed through in violation of procedure established by law, Supreme Court orders in Ajayinder Sangwan & Ors. and under the stewardship of a Committee much like yours.

While appealing in front of the Karnataka Information Commission, on the refusal of certain information by KSBC regarding G.A.Srikante Gowda, KSBC submitted that as per its resolution Res.No.140/19, dated 13/14.04.2019, it had destroyed all enrollment application forms along with documents of all advocates of Karnataka up to the year 2010. As such they did not possess and never did possess any of the documents needed for the verification drive or documents submitted during the enrollment process. Such as, for instance, law degree certificates. Leading to a “reasonable man” conclusion that KSBC did not comply with the orders of the Supreme Court in Ajayinder Sangwan & Ors. v. Bar Council of Delhi & Ors to collect the necessary degree certificates to send to the universities for verification and thereby compromised the process of verification.

In 2021 my sister and I started the Herculean task of following procedure established by law and entered into the domain of the relentless continual unceasing complaint. One of the grounds of our complaint remained and remains the violation of procedure established by law in the verification of both these advocates. The absence of the original enrollment forms and documents, the non-collecting of documents for verification and the defective verification forms evidences the ways in which the system can be manipulated, ruptured to produce and legitimise exactly what the Supreme Court seeks to eradicate. Even when there was a Committee steering the wheel. Complaint to the KSBC, against M.Amarantha, resulted in a dismissal on the ground of locus standi. Apparently the logic is that you can complain about a fake advocate only when he is your fake advocate! This we subsequently challenged in the Supreme Court and as of now lies with the Bar Council of India for consideration unless it’s already “untraceable”. Complaint to the Bar Council of India regarding G.A.Srikante Gowda became “old” and “untraceable” within a year of filing. We subsequently took it to the Supreme Court who directed us to the High Court of Karnataka. This complaint currently stands in no man’s land.

More than 4 years after we brought this information of two fake advocates working within the system to the notice of the statutory regulatory bodies, brought to the notice of Presiding Officers of the courts in which they appear, brought to the notice of the administrative judges of the district courts, brought to the notice of the administrative Justices of the High Court of Karnataka and brought to the notice of the Supreme Court of India they continue to work. They continue to appear. They continue to access the privileges afforded to advocates. They continue to have access to court files, records and documents. And in our case, they continue to prosecute two fake criminal trials, instituted as part of a 15,000 crore scam and a fake civil trial that have decimated my life and my family’s life. Moreover I am burdened with facing unexplainable insurmountable hurdles on the administrative side of both the High Court of Karnataka and the Supreme Court of India whether it be getting my cases listed or banal things like obtaining certified copies. Special Leave Petitions filed challenging orders passed by the High Court of Karnataka on Writ Petitions, challenging the institution of fraudulent criminal and civil trials [wherein one of the fake advocates has been made a party], are being arbitrarily shuffled around refusing to be listed in front of a Bench. Yes this is happening in the fully automated Supreme Court of India. The system has taught me to never ever underestimate the capacity of fake advocates on the use of exemplary innovative hacking methodologies.

The Systemic Support for Fake Advocates

I am touched by the concern shown by the Supreme Court again to weed out fake advocates. But I also know such a concern has rarely been expressed when I have stood up with prima facie proof to complain. Far from concern my sister and I have been threatened by thugs turning up home, have been and continue to be slandered, bullied and intimidated at every Court hearing for having dared to complain about fake advocates. When advocates brazenly verbally attack us in “open court” and such behavior is not only allowed but condoned we know the system does not like the institution of complaints against fake advocates. And hence I am, rightfully so, suspicious of what appears to be contrary [your mandate] to what is happening on the ground.

The public has been asked, without ever being an afforded an explanation as to why the former committee failed, to put their trust in this new endeavor. Repetition, as we know, is symptomatic of an inability to process the malignant in the system. Unless this malignancy is named and afforded recognition then any repetition in the form of new attempts at restoring homeostasis is doomed to fail. Can we start with “Houston we have a problem”? Otherwise I regret to say that this Committee is not going to be able to solve the issue of fake advocates. If that is the stated and the actual goal I mean. But I’ll understand if otherwise.

If fake advocates have to be weeded out it is important to understand how the system produces them, why they exist and thrive and how an assent to fake advocates is nurtured, maintained and reinforced. Otherwise this committee runs the risk of being rendered a Debordian spectacle. And at its worst will end up legitimising all fake advocates currently working in the system. My experience, and that of my sister’s, of fighting fake advocates in all possible forums through all possible means has taught me a few lessons. Fake advocates are the foot soldiers of the legal redressal dispensing system. They exist because they fulfill certain systemic functions. They execute that which is forbidden by law. A cleansing of sorts if you will – of bodies which are abhorrent to the system. Through actions such as inter alia filing fake cases, evidence tampering, manipulation in listings, tampering of the Central Information System, forging of signatures of Presiding Officers, tampering with court records invariably concerning property held by queer, non-heteronormative, gendered, disabled, caste and class located bodies. So while as a country we blaze through queer, disability and privacy rights in Supreme Court judgments those of us who are queer, non-heteronormative, gendered, disabled, forced into class and caste positions are quietly stomped out by the system through the use of fake advocates.

Why weed out Fake Advocates?

The answer to the question of how fake advocates adversely affect the system is dependent on who is answering it. It is but evident that disruption to court work in the form of boycotts and strikes is something that the Bench abhors. It is also evident that the disruption to a free and fair election to the Bar Councils is something that one would assume a majority of the Bar abhors.

What is unheard here and as such completely effaced is the disruption to constitutional rights of litigants – the right to a free and fair trial and the right to not be deprived of life and liberty except according to procedure established by law. Because let me make it clear that the fake advocates that we know of don’t disrupt court work, they run the courts and produce the law or a convoluted version of it anyways. How does one expect a fake advocate to follow the law when their whole existence and being is premised on a singular act of fraud? It breeds a certain contempt for the law itself.

My four year experience of the complaint process has driven home the fact that a public non-advocate assertion of the right to a free and fair trial is always read as un-intelligible, as illegible, as gibberish, of not enough human value. I have come to realize that the refusal to recognise the loss of my life and my family’s life as a consequence of the machinations of a bunch of a fake advocates is the norm. We the litigant public are just bodies, articulations, mediums on and through which the law gets to be constructed and deconstructed. The absence of any mention of how a fake advocate destroys the lives of litigants in both Ajayinder Sangwan & Ors. and Ajay Shankar Srivastava evidences the ways in which the phrase “administration of justice” is read and that is to the exclusion of litigants unless of course they are of a certain pedigree. Fake advocates do not function in the world inhabited by that of the pedigreed folks. After all if you possess a bloodline that’s worth any salt you aren’t really predisposed to hiring a fake advocate or being at the receiving end of one.

It is imperative that we address the missing bodies and the missing voices in this dialogue happening between the Bar and the Bench. It is the bodies that are most impacted on, whose very life and survival is put at stake date after date, who are stakeholders. And yet there is no place at the table. There has never been any attempt to make space. The refusal to recognise the stakes of the litigant public runs the risk of becoming the embodiment of an exercise of a social hegemonic power that seeks to put litigants in their place. It is a fear that reconstituting the litigant public as speaking subjects threatens the structure of what has come to be practice. A practice that in every other pedagogical field has been so reviled as to produce shame in anyone practicing it i.e. the entitled right to speak and decide for another. Such a discourse effaces one in the act of representing what is best for one, a discourse that denies our participation, our agency and our lives.

Systemic Flaws in the Verification Process

The blatant systemic issue staring in our faces is the question of who’s auditing the verification process? That is the lack I presume your Committee has been asked to fill up. We now know from the documents received through the RTI that a refusal to have an independent audit of the verification process and a complete dependence only on the filing of compliance reports doesn’t paint an accurate picture of what’s actually happening on the ground. Example – compliances reported in Ajayinder Sangwan & Ors. by Karnataka State Bar Council as opposed to the defective verification forms without documents, of the aforementioned two advocates, that passed verification.

What I find to be of immediate concern and dangerously so is the verification process overseen by the Supreme Court as spelling the death knell for Proviso to Section 26(1) of the Advocates Act, 1961. This Proviso and its attendant Rules 1 & 2 of Chapter VII Part II of the Bar Council of India Rules which governs the removal of names from the advocates rolls on account of fraud in enrollment. A flawed verification process and that too under the stewardship of the Supreme Court of India is going to result in a dismissal of all complaints brought under these rules on the simple ground that all advocates are verified. Even though these may be fraudulent verifications as in the case of the two fake advocates we have been fighting.

Our Ethical Obligations

The earlier verification process has not been transparent to the public and I fear this will be the case here too. Non-transparency can become a method of coercion, a way of foreclosing questions, shutting down conversations. Opening this conversation up stems from being compelled to complain because my life and what has happened to my life is bound to the lives of the strangers I encounter in courts. And I refuse this recruitment to a space of non-transparency and of silence on the strength of that which binds me, an ethical and moral obligation, to those similarly situated in place and time.

This Committee should be bound too. It ought to be bound to attend to the questions of constitutional and inherent rights, questions that address matters of life and death. It is a constitutional obligation to Article 21 of the Constitution of India to ensure that no one is deprived of their right to life and liberty except according to procedure established by law. A fake advocate on the very face of it is a violation of this most revered right at least in theory.

A court without fake advocates is a space in the realm of the fantastical. The institution of your High Power Committee offers us this fantasy as a possibility. That it is possible to imagine not having one’s survival tied to a crook, a fraudster who parades as a legal practitioner. The fantastical is what points us in the direction of movement, of rendering something real but this could so easily turn into mere “spectacle”. This committee could in fact fulfill the mandate given to it through framing guidelines and directions that might include the following:

1. A public call for suggestions and recommendations from the non-advocate public
2. An independent audit of the verification process
3. Publishing of a database of verified advocates with their antecedents (as suggested by the Law Commission of India’s 266^th Report),
4. Publishing of degree verification reports by the Universities
5. Publishing of compliance reports of the State Bar Councils

I sincerely hope that this letter is taken in the spirit in which it is written. Not as an attack but as an invitation to collectively forge a space in the future that is not just a legal redressal mechanism but a space of justice.

Sincerely,

Rashmi Munikempanna

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