C.
.. Gandhi had
- in the law courts.
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Answer:
Gandhi was a lawyer for almost 25 years before he became an apostle of nonviolent revolution. While leading the independence movement in India, Gandhi worked as a journalist and edited the Young India, Navajivan and the Harijan.
In South Africa, Gandhi led a civil disobedience movement to fight racist laws on several occasions. Charles R. DiSalvo, in his book The Man Before The Mahatma: M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law in Morgantown, has argued that it was the injustice of the South African legal system that turned Gandhi away from the courts. “Gandhi eventually lost faith in the traditional legal system – courts, judges, lawyers, litigation – but he never lost faith in the law,” DiSalvo says in his study of Gandhi’s legal career.
Gandhi in his writings and public speeches remained a bitter critic of Indian courts and lawyers. He believed that Indian justice system rewarded the wealthy and compounded the miseries of the poor. Yet he would enjoin lawyers to place “truth and service” above the perks of the profession. He advised lawyers to write their petitions in a simple language.
What a lawyer charges a client remains largely unregulated in India and there is a growing demand for a law to regulate hefty fees charged by the lawyers. However, Gandhi, addressing the Bar Association Peshawar way back in 1938, had asserted, “I confess, I myself have charged what I would now call high fees. But even whilst I was engaged in my practice, let me tell you, I never let my profession stand in the way of my public service…”
He maintained that throughout his career at the bar he never once departed from truth and honesty. “The duty of a lawyer is always to place before the judges, and to help them to arrive at, the truth, never to prove the guilty as innocent.”
As far back as 1909, Gandhi had slammed lawyers in his book, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, for encouraging litigations and prolonging them. He stressed on lawyers to promote reconciliation.
Gandhi blamed lawyers for giving legitimacy to the accusation against Indians that “they love quarrels and courts, as fish love water.” Gandhi also denounced them for their tacit support to the British colonial rule.
He doesn’t stop here in his scathing criticism. In the book, he goes on to say: “Men take up that profession, not in order to help others out of their miseries, but to enrich them. It is one of the avenues of becoming wealthy and their interest exists in multiplying disputes. It is within my knowledge that they are glad when men have disputes. Petty pleaders actually manufacture them. Their touts, like so many leeches, suck the blood of the poor people.”
“Lawyers are men who have little to do. Lazy people, in order to indulge in luxuries, take up such professions. It is the lawyers who have discovered that theirs is an honourable profession. They frame laws as they frame their own praises. They decide what fees they will charge and they put on so much side that poor people almost consider them to be heaven-born,” he adds.
In his weekly journal, Young India dated October 6, 1920, Gandhi warned that justice must not be a luxury of the rich. “Law courts are probably the most extravagantly run. I have some knowledge of the scale in England, a fair knowledge of the Indian and an intimate knowledge of the South African. I have no hesitation in saying that the Indian is comparatively the most extravagant and bears no relation to the general economic condition of the people.”
He continues, “The best South African lawyers –and they are lawyers of great ability –dare not charge the fees the lawyers in India do.