Mukul Rohatgi to return as AG for 2nd tenure

New Delhi: Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi is set to return for the second tenure as the Attorney General of India, the top most  law officer of the Central government, from October 1 after the incumbent Attorney General K. K. Venugopal relinquishes the office on September 30 for health reasons.

Earlier, Rohatgi was the 14th Attorney General for three years starting from 2014 to 2017 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power.  He had quit over some issues following which K.K. Venugopal was appointed as Attorney General on July 1, 2017.

The Supreme Court striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) in 2015 turned out to be a sour point between Rohatgi and the Modi-led NDA government.

Venugopal, a veteran jurist and a constitutional law expert, was given two one-year extensions beyond his 3-year tenure, though he repeatedly expressed his unwillingness to continue in the post.

In June this year, his term was extended by three more months to let the government search for a new face. He told a Constitutional Bench last week that his tenure ends on September 30.

After finishing his LLB from the Government Law College, Mumbai, Rohatgi came back to Delhi to practice law in the chambers of Yogesh Kumar Sabharwal, who later went on to become the 36th Chief Justice of India.

Rohatgi is an acknowledged lawyer in the legal fraternity for his competence in handling political, constitutional and corporate cases. In 1999, he was appointed as the Additional Solicitor General for five years by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, an appointment that saw him shift base from Mumbai to the Supreme Court.

He was designated a senior counsel by Delhi High Court in 1993. Rohatgi hails from a family with deep legal roots. His late father Justice Awadh Behari Rohatgi, was a former Delhi High Court judge and senior advocate at the Supreme Court.

Rohatgi represented the Gujarat government in the Supreme Court in the 2002 Gujarat riots cases and fake encounter cases. During his 3-year stint as country’s 14th Attorney General, he successfully defended the Centre in the important cases like triple talaq, challenge to Aadhaar in context of privacy being a fundamental right. That eventually led to a five-judge bench examining the correctness of two earlier judgments that had ruled that privacy was not a fundamental right.