Hon'ble Soli Sorabjee passes away Former Attorney General and the Legal Legend of India

 

He has appeared in several historical cases, including the Kesavananda Bharati case or commonly known as the Basic Structure Doctrine case.

Prominent legal expert and jurist and former Indian Attorney General Soli Sorabjee passed away on Friday due to COVID-19 complications.

Sorabjee was born on March 9, 1930 at that time in Bombay into the Parsi family. He was a product of St. Xavier's College and Government Law College. He was admitted to the Bar in 1953.

He has appeared in several historical cases, including the Kesavananda Bharati case or the Basic Structure Doctrine. He earned the iPadma Vibhushan for promoting free speech and human rights. Even recently, he raised his voice in protest against JNU students who were slapped for rebelling by voicing their dissent.

He worked for the Sikh pro-bono community after the 1984 riots. He was appointed Honorary Member of the Order of Australia.

He was twice appointed as Attorney General of India.

In his autobiography before Memory Fades, attorney general Fali S. Nariman, remembers Sorbajee's entry into the rooms of the former Bombay Bar stage, Sir Jamshedji Kanga, as a junior lawyer.

"For a long time we were rivals, we later became unfriendly rivals, but now, in the evenings of our lives, we are friends," wrote Mr Nariman.

The letter refers to the honorable work of Sorabjee, who became Attorney General of India (twice - first in 1989 a year, and again in 1998 for five years).

But Sorabjee was more than a lawyer. You put in a lot of caps. Jazz aficionado. Visiting his Neeti Bagh he saw the lines and lines of jazz records.

"Do you like jazz? Do you want me to play one for you?" he had asked after the conversation.

Sorabjee was a diligent student of essays. He said it suits his style. Short and crisp. The novel took a lot of patience.

"The soul of the journey is freedom, complete freedom, thinking, feeling, doing as one pleases ... We go on a journey mainly so that we do not have all the obstacles and all distractions," one of my favorite writers, William Hazlitt, wrote On Going a Journey.