Former Advocate General of Maharashtra Darius Khambata in his first ever soundbyte to the press, reflects on his career as a government pleader. In an exclusive interview with The Firm, he sheds light on the law officer’s powers of conscience keeping and persuasion, over five years of “stressful spade work” and on the collegium system having “seen its day”.

Excerpts:

Again a fair amount of misconception about what it means to be a law officer. Several law officers before me have shown that you have to be independent. You are not a spokesperson for the government and you should not be. You have to exercise an independent will and a sense of judgment. Having said that, you are obviously still a lawyer appearing for a party which is the government. So, you do your best for them and you are not a vigilante. You are not going around trying to look up or look for exposes. You are a lawyer but you try to impart to the officers and to the politicians and ministers you deal with a sense there is right and there is wrong. They may not always understand that, but they always respect that.

if in a particular case, I felt that there was something untoward and there were cases where certain orders had been passed, actions had been taken which I was not at all comfortable with, I did offer the government the option of pulling back, of saying we will retract that order, pass a fresh order or go to another officer and in some cases they did take my advice. Where they didn’t in some cases I have actually returned the brief.

I am not sure whether I can or cannot but I did because I was certainly not going to get up and defend something that was indefensible. In many other cases, I went to court and I had given prior notice of this to the government, I went to court and I conceded. It is not my duty as a law officer to defend the indefensible.