Well Argued · Advocate

Anil Divan: the advocacy that left a mark

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

Anil B. Divan (1930 to 2017) was one of the most respected senior advocates of the Supreme Court of India, remembered as much for the causes he took up as for the cases he won. He was a pioneer of public interest litigation in India, a leading voice for judicial accountability and the independence of the Bar, and a lawyer whose reputation for integrity was itself a kind of argument. This is an editorial profile for readers who admire good advocacy. It is a recognition of a legacy, not an endorsement, and not an offer of anyone's services.

01The man and his era

Anil Bhagwanlal Divan was born in 1930 and built a career that ran through the formative decades of the Indian Republic, when the courts were still working out the balance between the state and the citizen. He was designated a senior advocate in 1972 and moved his practice to the Supreme Court of India in 1979, arriving at the apex court just as a new kind of litigation, brought not for a private client but for the public at large, was beginning to take shape.

That timing mattered. Divan belonged to a generation of advocates who saw the law not only as a profession but as a trust. He came up when the Emergency of 1975 to 1977 had shaken public faith in institutions, and when lawyers began to ask what role the Bar should play in holding power to account. He spent the rest of his life answering that question in practice.

This is an editorial profile written for readers who admire good advocacy. It is not legal advice.

02The cases and causes he is known for

Divan appeared across the full range of Supreme Court work, from constitutional questions to the biggest commercial and federal disputes of his time. He represented the Government of Karnataka in the long-running Cauvery water dispute, one of the most difficult inter-state river disputes India has seen, where the task is less to win a single point than to hold a position across years of hearings.

He also appeared in the proceedings on the recovery of unaccounted money held abroad, the matter often described in the press as the black money case, where he was associated with the petitioner side led by Ram Jethmalani. These were cases that went to the machinery of the state itself, how investigation is conducted and how the executive is held to its duties, and they suited a lawyer who was drawn to questions of accountability.

What united his work was a refusal to treat the law as a game of advantage. He argued hard, but his standing came from the sense that he would not mislead a court and would not take a point he did not believe in. In a profession where reputation is the real currency, that was his.

03Public interest litigation

Divan is remembered above all as a pioneer of public interest litigation, the Indian innovation that lets a citizen or a group bring a matter to the constitutional courts on behalf of those who cannot come themselves. In its early years this was uncertain territory, and it needed senior advocates willing to lend it their credibility and their time, often without a fee.

He gave both. Work that defends the public interest, and that asks the courts to make power answerable, is exactly the kind of advocacy that deserves to be seen and remembered. Divan showed that a leading commercial advocate could also be a conscience of the Bar, and that the two were not in tension but in balance.

He was associated with efforts to found and sustain public interest groups and with the Committee on Judicial Accountability, which pressed for standards and transparency in the higher judiciary. For Divan, accountability was not an attack on the courts; it was the condition of their authority.

04His craft

Divan was admired for the clarity and restraint of his advocacy. He did not rely on volume or theatrics. He built arguments carefully, anchored them in the record and in principle, and trusted the bench to follow a well-laid reasoning rather than a raised voice. Younger lawyers who watched him learned that calm and preparation are more persuasive than noise.

He also wrote for the profession and the public, explaining the law and the duties of institutions in plain terms rather than jargon. That willingness to teach, to make the law understandable to people outside the courtroom, was part of how he understood the lawyer's role in a democracy.

05What he gave the profession

Divan's contribution runs along two lines. First, he helped establish public interest litigation as a serious and respectable part of Indian legal practice, not a sideshow, by bringing to it the same rigour he brought to a commercial brief. Second, he set a personal standard of integrity that colleagues still invoke: the lawyer whose word a court could trust.

He stood for the idea that the Bar is not merely a collection of individual practitioners but an institution with duties of its own, to the courts, to the Constitution and to the public. A profession keeps its freedom only if its members are willing to defend it, and Divan was willing. That example, more than any single judgment, is what younger advocates inherit from him.

This profile records that contribution with respect. It celebrates a legacy; it is not an endorsement.

06A lawyer for the institution

It is worth pausing on what it meant for Divan to serve as president of the Bar Association of India and to lend his name to the cause of judicial accountability, because these were not honours he collected but burdens he chose. A busy senior advocate has every incentive to keep his head down, argue his briefs and avoid controversy. Taking up the independence of the Bar and the conduct of the higher judiciary meant spending reputation, not building it, and risking friction with the very institutions a lawyer appears before.

Divan took that risk because he believed the health of the courts was the precondition of everything else a lawyer does. An advocate can win cases only in a system that is independent and trusted, and that system does not maintain itself. It has to be defended, patiently and in public, by people with the standing to be heard. He understood that the most important client a senior advocate ever has may be the rule of law itself, and that this client pays no fee.

For younger lawyers the lesson is twofold. A great practice and a public conscience are not opposites, and the arguments that outlast a career are often the ones made not for a paying client but for an institution. This profile honours that example, as a recognition of a legacy rather than an endorsement, and without presenting him as available for any work.

07Related profiles

Divan belongs to a line of advocates whose work shaped the profession. Two more profiles in the Well Argued series:

• Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer, advocate and a member of the Constitution's drafting committee.
• Anna Chandy, India's first woman High Court judge, who began at the Bar.

08About Well Argued

Well Argued is a free, curated publication by Claw that gives an advocate a hard-won court victory an audience, turning a winning judgement into a short, well-told story that Claw shares across its social channels, its website and the AI answer engines. Advocates like Divan are remembered because someone recorded the work and the causes they stood for. Good advocacy still happens in trial courts and High Courts across India every week, and most of it is never seen beyond the cause list. Recording work that deserves to be seen is exactly what Well Argued exists to do.

09Frequently asked questions