The Hindu Business Line : Why is there no service tax on lawyers?

KARKARDOOMA court complex of Delhi was in the news recently because of a scuffle between a lawyer and a cop. As with any melee, there is always confusion for onlookers, because you don't know who beat whom, especially when each side said it was the other that landed the first blow.

Thus, one day, it's in Chennai where you find professionals pulling one another's coats or generally deflating tyres. Another day, action is in Lucknow with pelting skills in full play. Yet another day, yet another photo-op. So, I search for the origin of the word to see if there is some violence in its DNA. "Pre-12th century. From Old Norse lög `laws', from lag `something set down', from a prehistoric Germanic word meaning `to put', which is also the ancestor of English lay," explains Encarta. But there are at least two usages that can be disturbing: `Being a law unto oneself' means to refuse to obey the rules, conventions, or suggestions made or upheld by others. (Is that something too apt for the situation?) Another, `taking the law into one's own hands' is to try to obtain revenge or justice without involving the police, courts, or usual legal procedures.

Perhaps we have too many laws. "Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate," said Henry Ward Beecher. Therefore, "like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time." But, as Charles Dickens said of the English law, "the one great principle" of law is "to make business for itself".

What was missing, if you had noticed, during the recent tiffs that the legal profession has been having, is public support. Ask around and see if you can get a sympathiser from outside the legal fold. This, in a country that boasted of some of its top freedom fighters drawn from the legal profession, should be surprising. It should have been a frustrated Richard Hyland who wrote in `A Defense of Legal Writing': "Legal writing is one of those rare creatures, like the rat and the cockroach, that would attract little sympathy even as an endangered species."

In an ideal world, there would be no offence and so none of these professionals may be needed, be they accountants or lawyers, though you can still get along with some docs and teachers around. William Shakespeare was in a different age when he wrote in Henry VI, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

No, audi alteram partem. Hear the other side! Administration machinery is not without its blemishes and so fault may rather lie on those who wield lathis in an attempt to apply brute force where argument is more appropriate. Shooting the messenger doesn't help. Nor is there any merit in having a notion of `agreeable person', as Benjamin Disraeli said, as `a person who agrees'.

As knowledge workers, however, those who practise law may have to subject themselves to a more visible code of ethics that evokes public respect in them as a profession. But this may be a suggestion that gets lost in the prevailing din. During the recent truckers' strike, it was even surmised that the protestors might insist that other services such as law and medicine be taxed first. That was the grouse accountants had, if you remember, when they were brought into the tax net.

I doubt if the North Block is even considering a tax on legal services. For, when at one of the usual post-Budget meetings the FM was asked by an industrialist why lawyers have been spared from service tax, the lawyer-turned-politician is said to have remarked: "There is a popular belief that lawyers render no service."

E&OE@thehindu.co.in

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