A fortnight before the imposition of Emergency in 1975, Nani Ardeshir Palkhivala met his friend M.R. Pai who spearheaded the Forum for Free Enterprise. A few days earlier Palkhivala had obtained a conditional stay on the Allahabad High Court's order, setting aside Indira Gandhi's election to the Lok Sabha, in the Supreme Court. Palkhivala explained to Pai that he had taken up the brief not because it was the prime minister's case but because he believed that a wrong-doing by a low-level functionary should not render the person at the top vulnerable. This, he believed, would hamper the smooth functioning of democracy. A few weeks later, when Mrs Gandhi declared Emergency, Palkhivala promptly returned her brief, dubbing it an attack on democracy.

NANI A. PALKHIVALA 1920-2002

There was no confusion in Palkhivala's mind ever. In both instances, his stand was lucidly in defence of democracy. Just as it was in the Keshavananda Bharti case. Defending the unassailable powers guaranteed to the citizens by the Constitution on Fundamental Rights, he presented to the Supreme Court an eloquent articulation that could only be Palkhivala's. He argued that the power to amend did not bestow the right to distort. In April 1973, the Supreme Court delivered the historic pronouncement that though Parliament could amend the Constitution it could not alter its basic structure. Few could match the clarity of thought, the ability to clinically analyse issues and articulate rationale with the fluency that Palkhivala commanded. C. Rajagopalachari once described him as "God's gift to India."

Born on January 16, 1920, Palkhivala spent his childhood in Tardeo and Nana Chowk in south Mumbai and joined the bar in the early 1940s and was recognised as a titan of the legal world when he was barely in his 30s. Indeed, his scholarship and ability to translate complex economic issues was well known among legal circles and he was way ahead in his thinking on socio-economic issues. Palkhivala advocated lower taxes, freer trade and opening up of the economy much before they became buzz words. He spoke of the need to liberate industry from the licence raj and spur enterprise when P.C. Mahalanobis had just authored the Second Five Year Plan.

Such was Palkhivala's oratory that his first one-off post-budget speech hosted by the Forum at the Green's Hotel, Apollo Bunder (now the Taj), in 1958 became a cult and he had to shift to larger venues and eventually to the Brabourne Stadium-better known as the venue for cricket matches hosted by the Cricket Club of India-where a crowd of over 50,000 people would come year after year till 1994 to listen to his analysis of what the government was doing with public money. The most notable part of these lectures was that Palkhivala never used any notes. It was a testimony to his supreme grasp of the subject. But naturally, former Maharashtra governor P.C. Alexander called him "the best finance minister India never had".

Palkhivala, who served as India's ambassador to the US and was on the boards of several Tata Group companies, was fearless in his criticism. And it came not just through oratory but also his books. In the heyday of socialism, Palkhivala authored Highest Taxed Nation and virtually compelled the government to simplify and rationalise tax structures. His other works include the seminal The Law and Practice of Income Tax, Our Constitution Defaced and Defiled besides his collection of speeches titled We, the People and We, the Nation.

To Palkhivala, India's brand of socialism did not result in the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor but only from the honest rich to the dishonest rich. In what could only be Nanispeak, he once said, "We are not poor by nature but poor by policy." PSUs, which are currently the subject of a hot debate, were also the pet peeves of Palkhivala who once described them as the black holes of the Indian economy. He was also equally critical of governance or the lack of it. In a recent speech, Palkhivala held that "the most persistent tendency in India has been to have too much government and too little administration; too many laws and too little justice; too many public servants and too little public service; too many controls and too little welfare."

Palkhivala's erudition was not limited to law or finance. He could quote from the Vedas or the teachings of Zarathushtra with as much ease as he could the constitutional laws and sub-clauses from the Income Tax Act. In his death, India has lost a legal luminary, a tireless campaigner for civil rights, a vocal proponent of the free press and a genuine philanthropist.

-Shankkar Aiyar