Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam meets President Patil

New Delhi: A day after he offered to resign Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam today met President Pratibha Patil, amidst reports that Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily has advised him against ‘acting in haste’.
Mr Subramaniam had offered to resign as the country’s second senior most law officer (after Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati) yesterday after a government slight where he was substituted by a private lawyer Rohington Nariman in the 2G scam case.
The decision to opt for Rohington Nariman in place of Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam by one of the important Ministers of the government – Union Communications Minister Kapil Sibal, to represent him and the Telecom Ministry before the Supreme Court was taken as an expression of no-confidence in him.
Upset over the fact that the government’s own law officers were not asked to defend the ministry, and a private counsel engaged instead, Mr Subramaniam spoke to Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily in this regard and expressed his ‘pain’ over the developments.
He later offered to resign but Mr Moily is understood to have asked him to restrain himself from doing so in a hurry.
Presently, Mr Nariman has been authorised to represent Union Communications Minister Kapil Sibal before the SC bench of Justices Ashok Kumar Ganguly and G S Singhvi in the case where the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) had filed an affidavit with the apex court alleging that Mr Sibal had favoured a telecom service provider embroiled in the 2G scandal.
The government’s decision to engage Mr Nariman, replacing Mr Subramaniam comes in the backdrop of Supreme Court severely lashing the Centre and its agencies for ‘inefficiency,’ not just on the issue of finding out black money stashed abroad and the 2G scam, but also the recent Salwa Judum case where it was asked to roll back its policies to handle Left extremism in the country.
In all these cases, besides several others where the government had to eat humble pie at the hands of the judiciary, Mr Subramaniam was seen as ‘failing the government’ in arguing its case.
The Solicitor General had earned the government’s ire way back in November last year after the Supreme Court asked it to file an affidavit on alleged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ‘inaction’ in preventing the controversial 2G spectrum allocation scam by retaining then Telecom Minister A Raja.
Immediately after this, Attorney General G E Vahanvati was asked to represent the Prime Minister in the Supreme Court, while Mr Subramaniam continued to represent the Department of Telecom (DoT).
Later, in other cases where the CBI received verbal lashings from the SC over its ineptitude in defending the ‘just cause’, the government padded its ‘defence’ with the services of other private lawyers like K K Venugopal who along with Additional Solicitor General Haren Raval represented the CBI.