Why Meghalaya Lawyers Want Advocate General Amit Kumar Out
Shillong’s lawyers took their fight with Advocate General Amit Kumar onto the streets on Thursday, marching from the Meghalaya High Court towards the Secretariat with placards reading “Amit Go Back” and “Cease Your Defamatory Remarks Against the Bar Associations.” The protest was the public face of a dispute that began in a courtroom and has since become a test of who speaks for Meghalaya’s legal profession—and who gets hired to represent the state.
At the centre is Kumar, the state’s top law officer. The High Court of Meghalaya Bar Association and the Shillong Bar Association have already struck his name off their rolls, resolved that members will no longer recognise him as Advocate General, and asked Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma to remove him from the post. Sangma has publicly backed Kumar. The bars have not stepped back.
The intern, the parade, and the court
The immediate chain of events started on 28 July. A woman law intern alleged that a senior Shillong advocate in whose chambers she worked had sexually harassed her and later put ₹500 inside her blazer as an inducement to stay silent. Police registered an FIR. The Shillong Bar Association suspended the advocate.
What followed was not only a criminal investigation. Members of the Hynñiewtrep National Youth Front entered the advocate’s chamber, dragged him out and paraded him through Shillong streets. Videos circulated of him being made to hold his ears and apologise. The bar associations called it “mob justice” and “vigilante action” and moved the High Court, arguing that non-state actors had taken over work that belongs to the police. They said the case against the advocate still had to be handled strictly according to law.
A bench of Chief Justice Revati Mohite Dere and Justice W. Diengdoh questioned why police had not intervened and why non-state actors were allowed to address the media from inside a police station. Police registered a suo motu FIR over the assault and public parade and, using video footage, arrested four people. The High Court kept the matter under its own watch. Around the same time, about 70 advocates wrote an open letter to the State Bar Council and the associations, pointing to the power imbalance between senior lawyers and interns and calling for real reporting mechanisms so that “perpetrators” were not emboldened and survivors were not silenced.
The remarks that split the bar
It was in that atmosphere that Kumar spoke. Appearing as Advocate General, he told the court that the state was acting, then added a confession that local lawyers have not forgiven. He said that as a member of the Bar he had failed, and that the Bar Association had also failed, “to protect even one lady member of the Bar.” He added that it was not the first such complaint. In later correspondence he went further: he declined to name other complainants, saying he would not become a “conduit” and that whether a woman complained, when she complained and to whom was hers alone. He accused the associations of moving fast against “mob justice” while still lacking a working Internal Complaints Committee, despite having agreed in April 2024 to set one up. A drop box in an open corridor, he wrote, was not a confidential channel. “Vigilantism does not grow where the law is strong,” he said. “It grows where the law is absent, or is believed to be absent.”
The associations heard a different message: a generalised, sweeping attack that they had failed to protect women and to provide a safe workplace, delivered in open court without particulars they could test. Senior advocate Kaustav Paul asked Kumar for details of the other cases he had invoked. The bars say those details never came in a form they could act on. They condemned what they called false aspersions on the entire fraternity.
Expulsion, “outsider” politics, and government briefs
On 5 August more than 400 advocates met in a joint extraordinary general body. They removed Kumar from the rolls of both associations with immediate effect and resolved that members would no longer recognise him as Advocate General. A formal letter went to the Chief Minister demanding his removal. The meeting did not stop at the court remarks. Lawyers called Kumar an “outsider,” objected to lawyers from outside Meghalaya being put on government panels, and complained that local talent was being sidelined in the state’s own legal work. Later protests added a sharper line on the same theme: “Stop Devaluing the Legal Professionals of Meghalaya by Hiring Outside Lawyers for Local Legal Disputes.” Associations have also flagged expenditure on Delhi counsel and the appointment of Kumar’s son as a state panel advocate. They want a transparent system that prefers competent local lawyers.
Kumar’s answer is constitutional, not collegial. The bars can throw him out of a voluntary association, he says, but they cannot take away the office of Advocate General. That appointment is the government’s, in practice the Chief Minister’s. He says he was given no notice and no hearing before his name was struck off. He has practised in Meghalaya since about 2006–07 and rejects the “go back” slogan as if he were a foreigner. “Where should I go back?” he asked. “Bihar, Hyderabad, Delhi?” He has a right to practise anywhere in the country, he argues, and he intends to keep doing the job he was given. After the expulsion he wrote to the association presidents expressing “sincere regrets” and saying he had only meant to highlight “institutional lacunae.” He has continued to function as Advocate General.
Delhi weighs in; Shillong does not blink
On 14 August the Supreme Court Bar Association asked the Meghalaya bodies to withdraw the resolution. Kumar’s words, it said, were made in judicial proceedings about a woman intern’s allegations and were an acknowledgement that women lawyers and interns need safe, dignified spaces. Disciplining an Advocate General for submissions in court was “unwarranted” and risked escalating the fight. The SCBA also urged a proper confidential mechanism for grievances. The Meghalaya associations refused to reverse the expulsion.
Four days before Thursday’s march, Conrad Sangma chose sides without parsing the transcript. He said he had not examined the detailed circumstances of the hearing or the exact words attributed to Kumar, but that Meghalaya was “very lucky” to have him. Kumar, the Chief Minister said, could have stayed in independent practice in Delhi or before the Supreme Court and had instead chosen to serve the state, guiding departments through legal hurdles. The government, he added, remained “very happy and thankful” that Kumar stood with Meghalaya. The bars had already given Sangma a one-week deadline. When it passed without a change of AG, they marched.
What the fight is really about
Two questions are now tangled. The first is how a small bar handles sexual harassment when the accused is a senior colleague and the complainant is an intern who depends on chambers for a start in the profession. The High Court is already seized of the parade and of police inaction. The intern’s criminal complaint will run in the ordinary way. Whether the associations build a confidential, credible complaints process is a separate institutional test—one Kumar forced into the open and one they say he smeared them for failing.
The second question is political and professional at once. An Advocate General is the government’s lawyer, not the bar’s elected leader. Local associations cannot sack him. They can refuse to treat him as one of their own, crowd the streets, and make the cost of keeping him visible. “Go back” is not a legal argument. It is a claim that Meghalaya’s courts and government briefs should be owned by lawyers who live the state’s professional life, not by a figure they now cast as both moral lecturer and pipeline for outside counsel.
Until Sangma changes his mind, Kumar stays. Until the bars drop the demand, Shillong’s lawyers will treat the state’s highest law officer as a man they have already expelled. The intern’s case, the videos of a lawyer being paraded, and the argument over who failed whom will keep running on parallel tracks—one in court, one in the associations, and one in the Chief Minister’s office.
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