Mukul Rohatgi appointed eminent jurist in Lokpal panel: Govt

Mukul Rohatgi, who once represented the government in the Lokpal case as the attorney general, has been named the “eminent jurist” on the search panel to find the chairman and other members of the anticorruption watchdog.

Rohatgi, one of the most sought after senior advocates in the Supreme Court, was nominated to the panel by a high-level committee comprising Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Justice Dipak Misra and the Lok Sabha Speaker.

The leader of the single largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, did not turn up after he was asked to join the process as a special invitee and not as one of its members.


Though the Lokpal Act had made the Leader of the Opposition a part of the consultative process, the central government has resisted co-opting the Congress into the process on the ground that it had not secured the minimum number of seats required for its leader to be declared the Leader of the Opposition.

The government had also cited this as one of the reasons why it was yet to give effect to the Lokpal Act, enacted under the Congress regime. It had declared that it would tighten the law to smoothen its working further.