Abbas KazmiThat lawyer, Abbas Kazmi, has filed a suit against these remarks the judge made while getting rid of him. Nariman, the expert, believes there is a …
May 9, 2010
Boarding a train from a Nasik village to Mumbai in the spring of 1973 for higher studies, KP Pawar had little premonition that three decades later he would be hounded by national media for taking up an unenviable assignment—defending the 26/11-terror mascot, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab. But life is stranger than fiction. Last Thursday, when Kasab was awarded death penalty by the special court in Mumbai, Pawar, hitherto a non-descript lawyer from Nerul, was waving at TV cameras, flashbulbs and scores of mediapersons seeking soundbytes from the man who had sought leniency for the convict. Mr Pawar wasn’t in the limelight six months back.
He was merely a junior lawyer, assisting Abbas Kazmi, the defense counsel for Kasab. In November 2009, Mr Kazmi was removed from the case for delaying the process of justice—first trying to prove that Kasab was a minor and later refusing the court’s suggestion to cross-examine only a specific number of witnesses.
Mr Pawar
being the junior lawyer handling the case, was an obvious choice to replace Kazmi. Overnight, he became a VIP of sorts, with a battery of commandos watching his back 24 hours. For a brief while, he would stay as the second-most popular Pawar in the country, after the Union agriculture minister.
