In the event that foreign lawyers are allowed into India, they would do well to tread lightly once they are there for fear of upsetting the local profession. We are indebted to retired solicitor Andrew Pryce for sending us some remarkable clippings from a recent Times of India, picked up during a visit there, including a front-page headline 'Lawyers bash up Pandher'. This referred to 'hundreds of Ghaziabad courts lawyers', together with 'a few litigants', taking the law into their own hands and hauling an alleged serial killer out of court, whereupon they nearly lynched him. 'Pandher was slapped, kicked, punched, kneed and jostled around like a sack of potatoes,' the paper reported. 'His hair and moustache were pulled and he was vilely abused. His trousers were torn right off him... some lawyers even climbed on parked cars to be able to hit him on the head, and egg the mob on.' An accompanying article, headlined 'Lawyers stoop to a new low', asked: 'Are the courts safe for litigants, undertrials [remand prisoners] and even judges?... this is not the first time that lawyers have turned unruly.'


An article somewhat deeper in the paper said there was apparently some dispute about whether the perpetrators were lawyers, but if they were, said the chairman of the Bar Council of India, 'the incident may land them in trouble'. As Mr Pryce observes, that is not exactly the clarion call to disciplinary action that one might expect to hear elsewhere.