Danial Latifi : [1917-2000]

Danial Latifi, a senior advocate, Supreme Court of India, died in New Delhi on 17 June 2000 at the age of 83. Latifi belonged to that section of Indian students which became politically radical while studying in England. Even so, he toyed briefly with an ICS career, writing from Oxford to his parents on 22 January 1937: There are four courses open to me, (i) to serve in the ICS in the Punjab; (ii) to serve in the ICS in Bombay; (iii) to practice at the Bar in Bombay, keeping away from Congress politics, perhaps with a view to office; (iv) to serve for some years in the ICS in the Punjab or Bombay, resign upon some oppressive action on the part of the government, and then to take up politics unhampered by any ties (this would probably mean fairly extreme Congress politics), while keeping alive by practising or by other means. In the event, Latifi did not enter the ICS at all and national politics itself took a direction he had not then anticipated. He was a grandson of Badruddin Tyabji, one of the early presidents of the Indian National Congress, and was influenced greatly in his life and work by Mian Iftikharuddin, who was president of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee when Latifi returned from England to start his career in Lahore. Iftikharuddin was respected by the Communist Party towards which Latifi gravitated and by the Muslim League which Iftikharuddin and, for a while, Latifi later joined. Latifis political activities during this period took their cue from Iftikharuddin. But he returned to Bombay, the original seat of his family, somewhat before Partition. In Bombay he set up practice in the chambers of K.T. Desai, who had till then not embarked upon his judicial career. Latifi respected Desais legal acumen and looked back with warmth to that association. Another influence on Latifi was that of the British lawyer, D.N. Pritt. He had met Pritt briefly while in England and later worked together with him in important cases including the case of the Telangana Twelve in 1950 and 1951. Earlier, in 1930-31, Pritt had argued the appeal in the Lahore Conspiracy case involving Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru before the Privy Council in London. Like Pritt, Latifi did not hesitate to take up apparently unpopular causes. The law for him was an instrument for change. This inevitably affected the nature of his practice. He defended trade unionists in several important cases in the Bombay High Court and elsewhere. His earlier cases saw him plead on behalf of the employee seeking payment of wages or other monetary claims from public and private authorities. These cases include Mushran v. Patil 1951 (53BLR1009) and Amritlal Varma 1953 (55BLR735). In Lal Badshahs case, 1954 (56BLR859) Latifi appeared for an employee who, at the time of Partition, had been given an option by the Railways to choose between joining the service of the railway company in India or in Pakistan. Badshah was allowed to make a provisional choice to be confirmed within six months. Latifis client had initially opted for Pakistan, but ultimately decided to come to India. The Railways refused to give Badshah wages for the interregnum. Latifi won the case and the railway company was held bound to pay.

Another striking case was that of Belosay 1958 (60 BLR 1255) in which Latifi with Rajni Patel, then the true fellow-traveller, argued the position that the Bombay Municipal Corporation had no power to pass a resolution relating to the execution of Imre Nagy in Hungary. The High Court held in favour of Latifis client, holding that resolutions on international affairs were ultra vires the powers of the Municipal Corporation. Latifis client won a political point. But when 30 years later, Imre Nagy was rehabilitated and his body disinterred to be given a more befitting formal funeral, Latifis reaction was that of visible satisfaction. Other cases in Bombay in which Danial Latifi participated included the famous Nanavatis case. Latifi appeared along with another counsel on behalf of the Bombay Bar Association. The Bar felt that the Navy could have been more respectful towards the court and Latifi was asked to make that point. In the Supreme Court, Danial Latifis first major appearance was along with D.N. Pritt in the case of the Telangana Twelve, the cases of Janardhan Reddy and others (1950 SCR 940 and 1951 SCR 345). These cases were lost. The Supreme Court declined to interfere on grounds that the proceedings and the trial in which the accused had been sentenced to death had been conducted in Hyderabad at a time when the state was not part of Indian territory. Latifi was involved in a line of cases concerning minority rights, i.e. cases focusing on the scope of Article 30 of the Constitution relating to institutions established or run by linguistic or religious minorities. He appeared on behalf of the Old Boys Association in the Aligarh Muslim University case (1968(1) SCR 833) and in the St. Xaviers College case (1975 (1) SCR 376). In both cases he attempted to balance the interests of minorities with the right and power of the welfare state to regulate these institutions. Although Latifi never went the whole way so as to drastically read down Article 30 as many are prone to demand, he looked back with satisfaction at the recognition by the Supreme Court in the St. Xaviers case that the right to manage did not include the right to mismanage. At one point in the St. Xaviers case, when the court appeared to be inclined to the view that Article 30 was restricted to providing religious or linguistic instruction only, Latifi related the story of how he had a friend who was fond of the bottle but afraid of his wife. On visiting the friends house one day he called out to him and it was only after a while that the master of the house emerged from under the sofa. The master of the house, Latifi declared, in the course of the proceedings, had not yet appeared from under the sofa. On being asked who the master of the house was, Latifi replied without a blink that it was the Union of India. (The Union of India had not made any argument in the case and the Attorney General was appearing only in his constitutional capacity). It was needless to spell out who the wife was. It is not known whether the silence of the Union of India on the initial inclination of the court was a factor in determining the view that ultimately found favour with the 9-judge bench. The Emergency (1975-77) came soon thereafter. During this period, Latifi appeared in several habeas corpus petitions. The post-Emergency phase was also eventful for Latifi. He succeeded in persuading the High Court of Delhi to intervene in a court-martial case and had an officer honourably restored to his rank and position in the army. The judgement

rendered by the High Court in R.S. Bhagats case has spelt out the parameters of judicial review in such matters. Among Latifis later cases was the well-known Shah Banos case ( AIR 1985 SC 945). In this case, which became household knowledge in India, Danial Latifi cited the great Muslim jurists, including Imam Shafei and Imam Jafar, in support of his position that the sum provided for maintenance of the divorced woman must in all circumstances be reasonable. He was a source of strength to the Bhopal gas victims organisations which sought modifications and review of the settlement in February 1989 between the Union of India and Union Carbide. Latifi was a great exponent of close Sino-Indian ties and was for many years the President of the All India Kotnis Memorial Committee established in memory of the medical mission sent by the Indian National Congress to China in the 1930s. He was, as such associations tend to be, uncritical of the Chinese. A man of austere habits, Latifis interests encompassed literature, linguistics, military science and, in recent years, computers. His work on the problem of a common script for Indian languages is a tightly argued case for the adoption of what he has described as a modified Indo-Roman script. He argued that a single uniform script for the Indian languages would help national integration in a manner that few other methods could accomplish. Sentimental considerations, he argued, should never be decisive in the choice of a script. After analysing the history of diverse scripts which have prevailed in India and in Europe, Latifi concluded that a language lives on while modes of writing change. In pursuance of his scheme for Indo-Romanization of the alphabet he prepared a compilation of some of Ghalibs works under the title GazaLiAt-e-GAlib (the capitals are deliberate and indicate assigned sounds). This is rendered in the proposed script and published on behalf of the Muslim Progressive Group (New Delhi, 1969). In his last years Latifi began to evince greater interest than before in the development of Urdu. He was gratified to find that his stand on Shah Banos case had come to be supported by a wide section of Muslim opinion. His stamina was in evidence when after a paralytic stroke at the end of March 1989, he quickly recovered and resumed work. A few years ago he was stricken again, this time by cancer. He reacted in a matter of fact manner, quietly got himself admitted to hospital and had the malignancy removed. In recent months, his health had deteriorated once again. He was full of fight and nothing was too small for him. Some years back when there were fewer ladies at the Bar than there are now, it was discovered that a senior advocate of the court was prone to use the ladies washroom which was closer to his chamber than the mens room. On one occasion, seeing the venerable gentleman enter the ladies room, Latifi bolted the door from outside, causing quite a commotion. A, perhaps apocryphal, extension of this story is that having locked up the eminent jurist, Latifi sent the key to the Chief

Justice of India! Even upto a few days before his death, Latifi was in high spirits, regaling visitors with his theories of recent events in Pakistan. His first wife, Sarahamma Ittyerah, was a well-known educationist in Lahore. She served on the Kumarappa Committee (on Industrial Development) in 1938-39, whose report was much praised by Mahatma Gandhi. She was also invited to help, before Independence, in the nationalist work on basic education. Some years after her death, and rather late in life, Latifi married Pakeeza Begum, a descendant of the last Moghul Emperor. Mrs Latifi maintains a warm home, steeped in the old world culture of Purani Dilli.

Anil Nauriya