From Article 370 and electoral bonds to the Waqf (Amendment) Act and Covid management and oxygen crisis cases, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta has been the Narendra Modi government’s troubleshooter of choice in high-stakes legal matters for several years now. Now, the government’s secondmost senior law officer has been tapped to head a team of lawyers who will prosecute 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack suspect Tahawwur Rana. Mehta was born in Gujarat’s Jamnagar and when he was 12 his family moved to Ahmedabad following the death of his father, a government employee. He began his career as an advocate in 1987 after graduating from the city’s L A Shah Law College. Though his most well-known clients have been Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Mehta’s first steps in the world of law were taken with the help of Gujarat High Court senior advocate Krishna Kant Vakharia, a Congressman who was an expert in cooperative society laws. In 1988, Mehta joined Vakharia as an apprentice. “He said he wanted to practise in the High Court. I gave him his first big break,” Vakharia told The Indian Express earlier. He remembers Mehta as an “intelligent, hardworking, proficient and articulate lawyer”.Mehta represented the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank in 2000. Shah was its chairperson at the time and spent hours drafting petitions, according to Vakharia who said that is how the two became “friends”. Mehta also represented Shah in the Gujarat Cricket Association election cases. The BCCI-affiliate body, which was under the control of Congress leader Narhari Amin, saw Shah taking over as vice-president in 2009. Mehta remained with Varkaria till about 2004 and then branched off to start his law practice. His rise began in 2008 when Shah, then a junior minister holding the portfolios of home and law in Gujarat, appointed him Additional Advocate General (AAG). As the AAG, he mostly handled civil litigation for the government. Mehta represented Gujarat in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case in which Shah was an accused. A Mumbai court exonerated Shah in 2014. This bolstered the Modi-Shah duo’s trust in Mehta, and in 2014, when Modi became the PM, he was appointed one of the six Additional Solicitors General in then Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi’s team. Mehta was seen as the “outsider” in a team largely comprising Delhi-based lawyers seen as close to Arun Jaitley. “I had just expanded my office in Ahmedabad and renovated it. Then the phone call from the Prime Minister came,” Mehta told The Indian Express in 2021. After Rohatgi quit as A-G in 2017, there was a spate of resignations in the government’s legal team and Mehta became even more indispensable. He handled almost every high-profile political case, including the plea for an investigation into the death of judge B H Loya. After then S-G Ranjit Kumar resigned in October 2017 citing “personal reasons”, the post stayed vacant for over a year until Mehta was finally appointed to the post on October 10, 2018. Mehta was one of the government’s key advisors as it prepared to abrogate Article 370 and abolish Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status. On August 5, 2019, the day Shah announced the move in the Rajya Sabha, Mehta was with the Home Minister in Parliament all day. ‘No-holds barred’ When cases challenging the clampdown in J&K came up before the Supreme Court, Mehta told the judges to “trust the security forces” and avoided any legal argument in the first hearing. On March 31, 2020, as the Supreme Court took up the matter of stranded migrants, Mehta attacked critics of the government as “prophets of doom” and said they “don’t even have the patriotism to acknowledge” that “ministers are working overnight”. Government and BJP insiders said Mehta was given the “difficult cases” because of his no-holds-barred style. “The Attorney General is a friend, philosopher and guide to the court. He is a conscience keeper and holds a constitutional post. The S-G’s job is to make sure the government’s stand is conveyed in court,” a top BJP functionary once said. However, outside the courtroom, Mehta is affable with friends, cutting across political lines. An Urdu poetry and ghazal enthusiast, Mehta’s library is lined with collections of Mir Taqi Mir, Wali Dakni and Ghalib. “You have to have interests outside the law. I read something other than the law every day,” said Mehta.
