When BCI Doesn’t Hold Discretion Either To Grant Or Disallow License To Practice, Why Such Bol Bachchan From Manan Kumar Mishra

Manan Kumar Mishra: The Politicisation of Power and the Corrosion of Professional Regulation

Manan Kumar Mishra has spent more than a decade at the apex of the Bar Council of India, the statutory body that decides who may practise law in this country, how legal education is regulated, how professional discipline is enforced, and how the organised Bar relates to the State and the judiciary. He has combined that office with membership of the Rajya Sabha as a Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentarian. The result is not merely a long tenure. It is a sustained demonstration of how a professional regulator can be transformed into an instrument of political alignment, institutional defensiveness, and administrative overreach.

The public record does not establish that Mishra has been convicted of personal corruption, fraud, bribery, money laundering, or embezzlement. The two criminal proceedings that reached the courts were terminated in his favour. The constitutional challenge to his dual role failed. Yet these legal outcomes do not exhaust the indictment. The deeper charge is institutional. Under Mishra’s leadership the BCI has repeatedly subordinated the appearance of neutrality, the requirements of individualised process, and the tolerance of criticism to the imperatives of political loyalty, centralised control, and protection of the Chairman’s authority. That pattern constitutes the real controversy.

The Dual Office and the Abandonment of Neutrality

Mishra was elected to the Rajya Sabha on a BJP ticket in 2024 and secured a seventh consecutive term as BCI Chairman in March 2025. The Delhi High Court dismissed the challenge that this arrangement created an impermissible office of profit or statutory incompatibility; the Supreme Court declined to interfere. The courts treated the question as one belonging to parliamentary disqualification mechanisms rather than writ jurisdiction. That technical result does not erase the institutional damage.

A body that regulates the entire legal profession, engages with the Union government on legislation and judicial appointments, and claims to speak for the independence of the Bar is headed by a sitting parliamentarian of the ruling party. Mishra has not treated the office as constrained by that conflict. He has used the stature and platform of the BCI Chairman to advance partisan positions with striking consistency. He offered to campaign for Narendra Modi while invoking his representative role within the legal profession. He has described Modi in quasi-messianic terms, including as “Mahatma Gandhi reborn.” BCI communications under his leadership have praised Modi and Amit Shah and referred to campaigning by Council members. He requested a court holiday for the Ram Mandir consecration and publicly celebrated the Ayodhya event as a civilisational triumph. After the abrogation of Article 370 he used the office to commend the government’s decision. During the Citizenship Amendment Act protests a BCI statement associated with his leadership dismissed demonstrators as an “illiterate ignorant mass.” In 2026, statements on BCI Chairman’s letterhead alleged that student protests were being infiltrated by anti-national forces and foreign adversaries—grave claims advanced without publicly produced evidence.

These are not the private opinions of a citizen. They are interventions by the head of a statutory regulator that is supposed to stand at a distance from party politics. The cumulative effect is the progressive conversion of the BCI into a platform that amplifies the ruling party’s narrative while disciplining or marginalising contrary voices within the profession.

Personal Proceedings and the Careful Boundaries of Allegation

Two personal criminal cases against Mishra have been examined in the courts. A private complaint alleged cheating, criminal breach of trust, forgery and conspiracy in connection with BCI fees and the Certificate of Practice framework. The Magistrate took cognisance. The Patna High Court quashed the proceedings, finding the allegations bald, unsupported by material showing fabrication, deception or personal diversion of funds by Mishra. A second case concerning an election poster from his earlier BSP candidacy was also set aside by the same High Court for want of evidence linking him to the act. In his 2024 election affidavit he declared no pending criminal cases and disclosed assets of approximately ₹14.94 crore.

No ED complaint, CBI chargesheet, PMLA prosecution, disproportionate-assets finding, or judicial determination that Mishra personally accepted bribes or embezzled BCI or AIBE funds has been located in the public record. These facts must be stated clearly. The absence of proven personal financial criminality does not, however, immunise the institutional record. It merely requires that the critique remain focused on the documented exercise of power rather than on unproven private enrichment.

Collective Punishment as Regulatory Method

The most revealing episodes of Mishra’s chairmanship involve the readiness to impose broad, anticipatory, or collective measures that later had to be walked back.

On 13 August 2026 an order issued under his authority directed State Bar Councils to refuse enrolment to the entire 2026 graduating batch of NALSAR University of Law while the BCI investigated an alleged protest connected with the participation of the Chief Justice of India at the university’s convocation. The justification was that disrespect toward the highest judicial office could indicate unsuitability for the profession. The order subjected hundreds of students who had no demonstrated involvement to the threat of professional exclusion without notice, hearing, or individual findings. A BCI member publicly called the measure “manifestly arbitrary.” The same evening the full Council withdrew the blanket restriction, acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of students were unconnected with the disputed conduct. The targeted investigation was allowed to continue. The reversal limited the damage; the original order exposed the governing instinct: treat enrolment as a disciplinary weapon and impose collective consequences first, process later.

The same instinct appeared in the suspension of approximately 126 Tamil Nadu advocates during protests linked to the Madras High Court. Mishra acknowledged that no conventional individual inquiry had preceded the action and that names had been gathered from various “sources.” The suspensions were later stayed or reconsidered. Critics correctly identified the episode as regulatory intimidation of collective protest without individualised adjudication.

The three-year blanket moratorium on new law colleges, later withdrawn; the Kerala High Court stay of orders by which Mishra constituted an interim authority for the State Bar Council despite the notification of elected members; and the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that excess enrolment fees beyond the statutory amounts were illegal and coercive—all form part of the same pattern. Sweeping central measures are announced, challenged for overbreadth or lack of authority, and then modified or abandoned. The consistent feature is the preference for unilateral or Chairman-driven action over the slower disciplines of collegiate deliberation and individual process.

The War on Criticism

In 2021 the BCI under Mishra approved rules that treated criticism of Bar Councils, their office-bearers, their decisions, and in some formulations judges as potential professional misconduct, punishable by suspension, removal from the rolls, or electoral disqualification. The rules were held in abeyance after intense opposition from the Bar Association of India and others. Their temporary existence remains the clearest documentary evidence of an attempt to place the institution and its leadership beyond legitimate professional scrutiny.

When LiveLaw published sharp criticism of Mishra’s use of the Chairman’s office, the BCI passed a resolution condemning the article as malicious and contemplated complaints to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as well as defamation proceedings. Mishra recused himself from the specific agenda item; the Council nevertheless acted institutionally in his defence. The message was unmistakable: critical reporting on the regulator would be met with the threat of state and criminal consequences.

Mishra has publicly attacked senior advocates who criticised judicial administration, dismissed the 2018 judges’ press conference, and supported action against lawyer-MPs involved in impeachment efforts. When a Kerala High Court judge orally criticised the ₹1.25 lakh BCI election nomination fee, Mishra wrote to the Chief Justice of India describing the observations as reckless and signalling that the BCI would seek the judge’s transfer. The letter represented an extraordinary institutional response to judicial questioning of a regulatory fee.

After the sexual-harassment allegation against then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Mishra supported a “Men Too” protest and emphasised the risk of false allegations. More than two hundred women lawyers condemned the stance as regressive and likely to deter complainants. During the same-sex marriage hearings the BCI under his leadership opposed judicial recognition and asserted, without credible survey support, that 99.9 percent of Indians opposed it. The Supreme Court Bar Association criticised the intervention as an improper claim to speak for the profession and the population on a matter then pending before the Court.

These episodes reveal a selective and instrumental approach to free speech. Criticism directed at the BCI, its leadership, or institutional authorities is treated as presumptively illegitimate and potentially punishable. Speech that aligns with preferred political or institutional positions is defended. The inconsistency is not accidental; it is characteristic of a leadership that equates institutional criticism with disloyalty.

Governance Failure and the Long Capture of the Institution

The Supreme Court has repeatedly recorded its dissatisfaction with the enormous backlog of disciplinary complaints pending before the BCI and State Bar Councils. At one point more than 1,200 transferred complaints were pending. In 2026 the Court directed a performance audit of the BCI’s disciplinary system, underscoring that self-regulation requires demonstrated accountability. The Central Information Commission has censured the BCI for failing to make mandatory proactive disclosures under the RTI Act. Questions raised about the procurement process for the All India Bar Examination contractor remain unresolved; no independent finding of personal corruption against Mishra has been established, yet the opacity itself is consistent with a broader culture of limited transparency.

Mishra’s repeated public estimates that 30 to 40 percent of advocates may be “fake” have persisted across more than a decade of his leadership. Either the estimates are inflated or the verification machinery under his prolonged stewardship has failed to solve the problem it continuously highlights. In either case the institutional performance is open to severe criticism.

The length of his tenure is itself part of the problem. Repeated re-election by BCI members does not convert concentration of power into democratic virtue. It has produced weak rotation, personalised exercise of collegiate authority, and a culture in which State Bar Council politics often orbits the national Chairman who is also a national politician. The result is an institution that has become difficult to distinguish from the political preferences and administrative temperament of one man.

The Record That Matters

Manan Kumar Mishra’s vulnerability does not rest primarily on proven personal financial crime. It rests on a documented pattern of conduct: the systematic politicisation of a statutory professional regulator; the repeated use of collective or anticipatory disciplinary power; the attempt to immunise the institution and its leadership from criticism; the confrontational treatment of journalists, advocates and even judges who question the BCI; the tolerance of prolonged administrative failure in the disciplinary system; and the progressive erasure of the boundary between the regulator of the legal profession and the ruling political formation.

That is the indictment supported by the public record. It is an indictment of institutional capture, of regulatory overreach, and of the corrosion of professional independence under prolonged personal leadership. The legal profession in India is poorer for it. The BCI under Manan Kumar Mishra has not merely regulated advocates. It has demonstrated how a statutory guardian of professional standards can itself become a vehicle for political alignment and the concentration of unchecked authority.