On January 8, 2011, the All-India Federation of Women Lawyers held the All-India Women Lawyers Conference in Hyderabad. Here, I was one of two women lawyers to be conferred with the prestigious Sthree Vakil Puraskar, an award meant for women lawyers who not only excel in their professions, but also moved on to other fields and made a mark. Although I was unable to attend in person due to illness, I felt an extraordinary sense of gratification at this recognition from my own community of lawyers, as also a deep sense of gratitude. More importantly, it made me think how lawyers in general have contributed to nation-building and enrich both the society and our democracy in innumerable ways.
For me, and I know most lawyers will share this with me, the law was never a profession but a passion, not a vocation but an avocation. It is often argued that the educated classes should enter public life and participate in politics. While this is true for all professionals, somehow it is most true of lawyers.
After all, public life, public service, public policy and the entire edifice of public institutions are built on the bedrock of law and constitutionalism. This is our training and, as such, part of what we bring to political life. It is almost an obligation for every educated Indian, and especially every Indian lawyer, to contribute to the larger framework of public discourse in India.
What do I mean by this? Am I suggesting that every lawyer should join a political party and contest elections? What I am calling for is active participation by enlightened legal minds in enriching the process by which we make public choices, we decide on the common good, we shape public policy, we anchor our democratic institutions and we make our politics more robust.
There is a context, a history and a heritage to my urgings. If we look back at the early years of our nationhood, at Independence in 1947 and at the complex and yet marvellous process by which we built our nation, by which we framed our Constitution and gave ourselves this republic, we will find in it the imprint of some of the finest legal sensibilities.
Mahatma Gandhi was trained as a lawyer. Jawaharlal Nehru gave up what would almost certainly have been a glittering legal career to dive into the freedom movement. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was one of the most successful barristers of his age but didn’t think twice before throwing off his legal robes and marching in step with the peasants of Bardoli. The father of the Constitution, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, was among the astute legal brains of the early 20th century in Mumbai.
This magical constellation, along with many others, came together in the late 1940s and early 1950s and forged the India that we now have. We could so easily have gone the way of many of our neighbours, or of other developing countries that also became free of the colonial yoke in that period. If we did not, if we learnt to respect the rule of law and if we became servants and followers of the Constitution, it is because those legal scholars brought their respect for and understanding of the law and regard for a society and a system based on rules to their blueprint for the new India. Today’s India is a legacy of extraordinary jurists.
My grandfather was in politics, as were members of my extended family. Yet there was no pressure on me to join politics. It was a very personal decision. I was young and inspired by the idealism and freshness of the late Rajiv Gandhi, a person whose essential goodness and honesty of purpose was apparent from even a five-minute meeting with him. Today, I see that essential purpose in Congress president Sonia Gandhi and in our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Yet, there was another reason for my joining politics and particularly the Congress. This was a party rooted in constitutionalism. It had been born and created and nurtured by legal postulates and principles, by demands for a rule-based political system and public space, by the gradual expansion of the ambit of freedom, in accordance with the law and with legal reference points. Politics is the natural home of the public-spirited lawyer.
At the end of the day, the legal profession and a lawyer’s mandate is about the pursuit of justice. At its best, politics is not very far removed.
On many occasions, legislatures and politicians set the path but the real journey of justice is undertaken by determined and upright lawyers who fight for their clients, or sometimes for deprived sections who cannot even afford legal fees, and actualise the intent of the law or of the provision to ensure access to justice for the ordinary women and men of our country.
That is why I say there is a symbiotic relationship between lawyers and politicians. The issue of access to justice — or the many forms of justice — is central to my personal political beliefs but much more than that, to that of my party and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The Right to Education Act, the Right to Information Act, the upcoming Food Security law — all of these are manifestations of that quest for perfect justice, that endless quest perhaps, that our founding fathers enjoined us to undertake. To realise this quest is as much the moral duty of the politician as it is the civic obligation of the lawyer.
At the same time, lawyers should consider their role in evolving society. Just as business corporations are now concerned with the concept of the triple bottom-line — of caring for people, planet and profit — and just as they invest resources in corporate social responsibility, is it time to institutionalise a lawyer’s social responsibility?
I am not recommending any external imposition; this is a call that has to come from within. I would urge that all of us, as lawyers, set aside a certain part of our professional time every year in pro bono work. This could relate to cases about gender and social injustice, about deprivation of rights for the poorest or most disadvantaged, about environmental activism and the greening of our planet — any cause that moves or shakes the conscience.
In doing this, lawyers will be serving our country and people and contribute to the greater public good.

Jayanthi Natarajan is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and AICC spokesperson. The views expressed in this
column are her own.