Day after verdict advocate-general Kishore Datta steps down, panel of lawyers scrapped
Telegraph | 6 May 2026
Kishore Datta stepped down as Bengal’s advocate-general on Tuesday, a day after the Assembly election results were announced.
Datta sent his resignation letter to governor K.N. Ravi in the morning, said sources in Calcutta High Court. With his resignation, the entire panel of government lawyers who represent the state stands scrapped, said a court official.
Later on Tuesday, a member of a BJP-affiliated lawyers’ association requested Chief Justice Sujoy Paul to refrain the high court from passing any order against the state government for three weeks. A new panel of government lawyers would be constituted by then, said the prayer.
The Chief Justice said he would consider the prayer.
The advocate-general is the highest law officer in a state, acting as the chief legal adviser to the state government and representing it in legal proceedings.
The Mamata Banerjee regime, marred by a string of legal setbacks in the high court and the Supreme Court, has had a tumultuous relationship with advocates-general.
Datta’s resignation was a formality after the BJP victory. But before him, Bengal saw five such resignations, including one from Datta himself.
In its 34-year stint at the helm, the Left Front had only three advocates-general: Snehangshu Kanta Acharya, Naranarayan Gooptu, and Balai Ray. After Acharya’s death, barrister Sadhan Gupta was briefly appointed as additional advocate-general.
But the trend changed drastically once the Trinamool Congress came to power.
Barrister Anindya Mitra, the first advocate-general appointed in Trinamool-ruled Bengal, resigned within 20 months, in 2013, citing health reasons. His resignation came a day after the high court admonished the state for refusing to follow a human rights panel’s recommendation in a case of alleged police harassment.
Mitra’s successor, barrister Bimal Chatterjee, resigned as advocate-general in 2014. He, too, cited health reasons.
But Chatterjee continued to appear regularly in court in private cases after resigning, prompting murmurs that he had quit as advocate-general because of political mandates and interventions from Nabanna.
Barely three years later, barrister Jayanta Mitra resigned as advocate-general. He remains the only one among the five outgoing advocates-general to publicly declare he had had differences of opinion with the ruling establishment. Mitra had said he was quitting to “keep (my) spine firm and straight”.
After Mitra’s resignation, Mamata had personally intervened to select Datta as advocate-general. But during Datta’s tenure, the state government faced a setback in the high court in a case relating to dearness allowance, besides losing the “post-poll violence” cases.
Datta stepped down months after Mamata was sworn in as chief minister for a third consecutive term, in May 2021.
Soumendra Nath Mookherjee was appointed advocate-general in September 2021. He resigned in November 2023, reviving the murmurs about political intervention.
Sources close to Mookherjee, a prominent practitioner of corporate law, said he had been “uncomfortable” in the post for a while before eventually stepping down.
Datta was appointed again after Mookherjee’s resignation.