Amid controversies, pressure mounts on Manan Mishra to quit as BCI chief

Manan Kumar Mishra has had a long innings as president of the Bar Council of India for 11 years and nine months. The BCI elects its president for a two-year-term but Mishra has been re-elected unopposed consecutively for six times. A petition filed in the Supreme Court has now sought to curtail the BCI president’s tenure to a maximum of three terms and to make it rotational. The petition also wants the BCI president to be elected by rotation from different states.

No BCI president has been elected in the last 30 years from 20 states, the petition states. Seven presidents represented seven different states for 18 years. However, Manan Mishra from Bihar has remained in the saddle for almost 12 years.

Even before his NALSAR moment, when he recklessly sought to blacklist an entire batch of students for the crime of writing to their own Vice Chancellor opposing the invite to CJI Surya Kant, Mishra has shot himself in the foot. Following the public outrage triggered by CJI’s statement describing the youth as cockroaches, which unwittingly led to the formation of the Cockroach Janta Party, Mishra rushed in to defend the CJI. As many as 40 per cent of the lawyers in the country had fake degrees, he claimed while adding that he had brought this to the notice of the CJI who was referring to them as cockroaches.

“The Bar Council of India is aware that around 35 to 40 per cent of those seen in court complexes wearing black coats and bands are fake. Their degrees are absolutely fake; they manufactured them somewhere or bought them from somewhere, and on that basis, they are practicing in courts,” the BCI chairperson is reported to have told news agency IANS. The BCI knows this, he said, because when it initiated the process to verify degrees, about 40 per cent of the advocates did not fill up the verification forms.

It was a damning confession of the BCI’s failure to regulate the legal profession. BCI’s job under the Advocates Act, 1961 is to lay down standards. It also monitors the standards and enrols law graduates, giving them the license to work as lawyers. Admitting that 40 per cent of the lawyers have fake degrees did no credit to the Council. During his long tenure, BCI has seldom flagged dubious law colleges, doubtful teachers or sellers of fake degrees, which makes his admission even more glaring. For this reason alone, he should have stepped down.

Mishra is also a MP in the Rajya Sabha and represents the BJP since 2024. In a recent column in The Times of India, Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde pointed out that it was problematic for the BCI president to wear both hats at the same time. As a BJP MP he is expected to defend the government while as the BCI president he is expected to safeguard the independence of the judiciary.

However, even before becoming an MP, Mishra has consistently been rooting for the BJP and Prime Minister Modi. He in fact campaigned for Modi in 2024, camping in Varanasi and grandiosely pledged the support of 1.7 million advocates to the BJP. At a press conference in the BJP office, he had said, “I pledge my support to Narendra Modi’s bid to become India’s next prime minister. I’m speaking in my capacity as a representative of 1.7 million lawyers across the country.”

In an effusive letter to the PM in 2016, Mishra addressed him as ‘My Lord’. In a report for Live Law in 2020, Vikas Bhadauria recalled that Mishra had declared that the PM could dictate to the regulatory body. “Bar Council of India is your institution…you are our guardian, our guide”. He went on to describe the PM as the “most efficient and able leader of the world”. What took the cake was this statement: “Though some of the leaders of BJP do not like me, but since I know that my leader is the most able leader of the world, I don't care for others.” At an event in Gandhinagar in 2024 he had also extolled the then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi as ‘Mahatma Gandhi reborn’.

Ironically, Mishra targeted lawyers like Dushyant Dave, Kapil Sibal, Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Vivek Tankha for allegedly politicising the bar while he himself had contested the Bihar election in 2010 and made no secret that he was a BJP member. He also deprecated the criticism of the Supreme Court by ‘disgruntled advocates and former judges’.    

Mishra famously hailed the Presidential nomination of former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi to the Rajya Sabha. He had also defended Gogoi when he sat in judgment in a sexual harassment case against himself.  Known for his controversial press statements, Mishra had described anti-CAA protesters as ‘illiterate and ignorant masses’ and the student protesters at Jantar Mantar in July 2026 as ‘anti-national elements’.

It seems unlikely that Mishra will resign on his own. He will quit only if the PM or the CJI or BJP asks him to go or if the Supreme Court amends the rules and restricts his tenure. The other option is for the Bar Council members to rally and record a vote of no-confidence