Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

ReutersA magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.

Caravan magazine digs deep in a profile of the attorney general of India, the federal government’s top law officer, the “Inside Man.” It’s an important piece and one that’s long overdue, as the story correctly and articulately points out: “In an era when fortunes can be made and lost on the whims of government policy (or the manipulation thereof), billions of rupees hinge on the decisions of the Supreme Court, which has become the ultimate arbiter in innumerable disputes between corporates and the state. Today, the country’s top lawyers, who charge upwards of Rs. 10 lakh (Rs 1 million) for a single court appearance, are some of the capital’s most powerful figures, Delhi’s closest equivalent to the Wall Street investment bankers that Tom Wolfe once dubbed ‘masters of the universe’.”

The attorney general, Goolamhussein Essaji Vahanvati, who’s been in the news for his alleged involvement in the fraudulent allocation of 2G cellular spectrum, has been deposed as a witness in a trial court, a first in the country.

Krishn Kaushik, the writer of the Caravan profile, notes that “Vahanvati is not the first attorney general to find himself mixed up in the messy partisan work of the government he serves; many Supreme Court advocates lamented that the independence of the government’s law officers had been corroded by political pressure over the past three decades. But Vahanvati has been more controversial than his predecessors, and not only because this government has been beset by allegations of spectacular corruption.”

“Over the past four months, while I was conducting interviews with Vahanvati’s friends and associates, fellow senior advocates, and Delhi’s corps of fixers and lobbyists â€" who occupy the intersection of government, business, media and law â€" the attorney general was rarely out of the news, and the news he was in was rarely good. One of his colleagues told me, admiringly, that Vahanvati was a man with ‘quick solutions to complex problems of law’; this makes him invaluable for a government whose trysts are mostly with crisis. But even feats of legal agility can’t keep an incorrigible client out of trouble forever, and eventually the lawyer is left holding the bill.”

Outlook magazine writes about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a cover story titled “A General Practitioner”. The story details Mr. Singh’s economic and political legacy, or the lack of it.

“Nine years at the helm of affairs, and the helplessness he was once forgiven for, now seems criminal. Once the middle class hailed him as the liberator of the economy, a modest soft-spoken economist, an honest man confronted by corrupt, capricious allies. That appeal was lost in no time as the UPA began its second term and the floodgates of scams and scandals opened,” the story notes.

Mr. Singh also faces pressure because of his law minister, Ashwani Kumar, who is embroiled in a controversy where he appears to be distancing Mr. Singh from a massive coal scam. “A well-placed source also says that the PM does not always get into the details and people act on their own initiative. He did not tell the law minister to act as he did. The only mistake he made was to keep an incompetent lawyer and arrogant fool as his law minister.”

The article says that Mr. Singh’s political party, the governing Indian National Congress, is blaming him and Mr. Kumar off the record in order to distance the Gandhi family, which wields the power in the party, from the corruption scandals.