When I found myself in a losing case against Senior Advocate Iqbal Chagla.
A tall and impressive presence, with a deep baritone voice, Iqbal Chagla’s persona was integral to his advocacy. It was hard not to be captivated by the sheer power of his words.
Mumbai recently lost four exceptional personalities in quick succession—filmmaker Shyam Benegal, civil engineer and urban planner Shirish Patel, gynaecologist Dr Rustom Soonawala, and senior advocate Iqbal M Chagla. While the four excelled in very different fields, collectively they defined the essence of Mumbai—its strong work ethic, extraordinary professionalism, courage, conscience, and, above all, its unique plurality.
In the autumn of 1994, I was a reluctant entrant at the Bombay Bar, a fraternity of lawyers that has nurtured the finest legal minds the country has produced. Nani Palkhivala, Ram Jethmalani, Fali Sam Nariman, Soli Sorabjee, Anil Divan, and Ashok Desai, among others, were products of the Bombay Bar, before they moved on to take centre stage in the Supreme Court. The Bombay Bar was also famed for being the wellspring of lawyers who catalysed the nationalist movement—MK Gandhi, Bhulabhai Desai, and KM Munshi were among them.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah was known as one of the finest advocates at the Bombay Bar, long before he brought the divisive two-nation theory to fruition with the partition of India. One of the young lawyers who trained in Jinnah’s chambers was Mahommedali Currim Chagla, who went on to become the Bombay High Court’s first Chief Justice in independent India. MC Chagla was strongly critical of his legal mentor’s politics and remained firmly committed to the idea of India. His son, Cambridge-educated Iqbal, known to most as ‘Mickey’, rose to be a leader of the Bombay Bar—its president for nine years in succession and one of its finest, most persuasive advocates.
Mastering the art of persuasion
On a hot October day, on the second floor of the Bombay High Court building, I entered a large room where lawyers sat in black coats with piles of briefs scattered untidily on long wooden tables. Rickety, old fans, suspended from high ceilings, whirred noisily above them, struggling to compete with the October heat. I was there to join the chambers of Janak Dwarkadas.
Qualified with a law degree, but otherwise entirely unfamiliar with the practice of law, I was in a strange place in a room full of strangers. Amidst that melee of (largely) men in black coats, I chanced upon one familiar face. It was the quiet and effacing Riyaz Chagla, who had been a year above me at Cambridge University, where we pursued a law tripos in different colleges. I had heard from my Bombay friends at Cambridge that Riyaz belonged to a distinguished legal lineage.
Warm and welcoming, Riyaz soon introduced me to other young beginners at the Bar and also to his father, Iqbal Chagla. It was a coincidence that my own senior, Janak, had been Iqbal Chagla’s junior. An outsider to Bombay and to the legal fraternity, briefs were not easy to come by. My gender, too, was unhelpful. Seeing that I had not made a single appearance in court even after a few months, Riyaz magnanimously passed on one of his briefs to me, carefully guiding me on how to request an adjournment before a judge who was particularly generous with adjournments anyway.
Within days of attending court, I saw Iqbal Chagla in action. A tall and impressive presence, with a deep baritone voice, his persona was integral to his advocacy. It was hard not to be captivated by the sheer power of his words. For the still briefless young entrants at the Bar, it was natural to gravitate to the courtroom where he was arguing. Even when knowing nothing about the case, one was sure to enjoy the experience of watching him adroitly weave through his brief, his opponent’s arguments, and the judge’s responses.
He would get to the nub of the case, the justice of it. His persuasion rode on his pulse of the court. Good lawyering entails a range of different skills. As arguing counsel, we are entrusted with persuading the bench to a certain point of view. That requires mastery of the brief, along with knowledge of the facts and of the law and how to apply it to the case. But most of all, it requires the power of persuasion, which Iqbal Chagla was masterful at.
He stood tall, both literally and figuratively. His advocacy was dignified and measured. One never saw him overstate his case. His easy felicity with language was a great asset. But even his pauses and silences spoke. At the Bar, we often encounter senior advocates drowning out a struggling young opponent. In the hurly-burly of what may sadly come to define advocacy, encountering a gracious opponent is not a given. I once found myself in a losing case against Iqbal Chagla. Barely two years at the Bar, it took courage to argue while other seasoned counsels watched. There was very little merit in my case but I had to do justice to my brief. Iqbal Chagla waited patiently till I finished. When his turn came, he declared in his inimitable style, “The only merit in the case on the other side is that my learned friend appears!”.
Rays of uprightness
Iqbal Chagla was the go–to counsel in all top-end corporate and commercial litigation. But he had a strong public conscience and would not brook any compromise on integrity either at the Bar or on the bench. He was the president of the Bombay Bar Association when a resolution was moved against then-Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court AM Bhattacharjee over what turned out to be suspicious and unexplained remittances from a foreign destination. Bhattacharjee was soon compelled to resign.
On one memorable occasion, Iqbal Chagla came to my rescue in a way that sums up the spirit of the Bombay Bar. I was representing an NGO that was committed to saving open spaces in the congested city of Bombay. It was a public interest litigation where, typically, counsels appear pro bono.
We were up against builders and had already secured a favourable interim order that protected parks from being swallowed up by developers. The latter had tried on previous occasions to get the stay vacated, but to no avail. The matter had been coming up before a particular bench known for its no-nonsense approach. We were taken aback when the matter was suddenly mentioned out of turn before the Chief Justice, who was due to retire within a few days. Our team found more surprises in store when the Chief Justice assigned the matter to the bench over which he presided, and proceeded to list it for hearing almost immediately.
During the course of arguments, the Chief Justice made oral observations in favour of vacating the injunction. I noticed that the otherwise quiet junior judge (still a relatively new appointee) appeared to disagree with the Chief Justice. I managed to get the matter adjourned only for a few days. The Bar seemed to have got wind that something was amiss. The news made it to Iqbal Chagla’s ears. He quizzed me about it and asked, on the day the matter was listed, “How long will it take me to get ready?” Delighted that he was volunteering to lead the arguments only because he felt that a good public cause should not be lost for the wrong reasons, I responded, “Fifteen minutes.”
I gave him my own set of papers and we sat down to prepare for the case immediately. As it happened, only minutes before the bench was to assemble, we got news that the bench will not sit because the junior judge had announced that he was unwell. Spontaneously, we exchanged smiles. The next day, which might have been the last active day for the Chief Justice before he retired, we were told that the bench would take up the case in the afternoon session. The staff assembled, the briefs were piled up, and glasses of water were kept ready for the judges. But at the eleventh hour, the junior judge announced that he was indisposed.
It was clear to us that the junior judge would not allow the Chief Justice to pass an order vacating the stay, either with him or without him. It was the upright and uncompromising junior judge, later elevated to the Supreme Court, who saved the day for us. But what both he and Iqbal Chagla did on that memorable day, was to reinforce my faith that even amidst the gloom of darkness, rays of uprightness find ways of shining through the cracks.
This piece would be incomplete without more than a mention of Iqbal Chagla’s very special significant other—Roshan Chagla, his wife of close to six decades. Roshan Auntie, as Riyaz’s friends call her, is defined by her poise and the perfection she brings to all she does. Her touch was apparent even in the most mundane of matters.
As young members of the Bar, when we all sat down for a quick bite during the court lunch break, Riyaz’s elaborately laid out course-by-course spread, lovingly curated by Roshan Auntie, would be quite literally his ‘neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride’. The dinner parties at their home at Pallonji Mansion in Mumbai were occasions much looked forward to for the exotic fare, finished off with her signature meringues. But most of all, what defined them as a family was their innate decency and their dignity in adversity. Iqbal Chagla’s life tells us that decency is not a dead virtue.
Madhavi Divan is Senior Advocate, Supreme Court. Views are personal.
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