Who is Harish Salve, the lawyer set to fight Vinesh Phogat’s olympic disqualification case?

PTC News Desk: Top attorney Harish Salve, who is scheduled to contest wrestler Vinesh Phogat’s disqualification from the Paris Olympics at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), is expected to carry the dreams of a billion Indians as well as the athlete himself.

Salve, a former King’s Counsel and Solicitor General of India, has a remarkable track record of managing high-profile cases. Examples of his work include defending Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav before the International Court of Justice and standing up for Ratan Tata in his legal dispute with Cyrus Mistry. Additionally, he represented the defence in the well-known Aarushi-Hemraj case.

Prior to her gold medal match on Wednesday, Vinesh Phogat, the first Indian woman wrestler to advance to the Olympic final, was discovered to be 100 grams overweight. As a result, the organisers disqualified her. Later on Thursday, she revealed in a devastating post that she was retiring from professional wrestling.

Phogat requested a joint silver medal be given to her and filed a motion with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) challenging her disqualification.

WHO IS HARISH SALVE?

Born in Maharashtra, Harish Salve is a well-known lawyer in India who studied law at Nagpur University. Before being the Solicitor General of India in November 1999, he worked as a senior attorney at the Delhi High Court in 1992.

In 2015, Salve, who is the son of NKP Salve, a prominent cricket administrator and minister, received the Padma Bhushan. He was named the Queen’s Counsel for the courts of Wales and England in January of last year. Reliance Industries, owned by Mukesh Ambani, and the Tata Group are among his most important clients.

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In recent years, Harish Salve has been in several high-profile cases:

Case of Kulbhushan Jadhav: In 2016, Kulbhushan Yadav, an Indian businessman, was kidnapped from the border between Iran and Pakistan. He was given a death sentence by a military court after the Pakistani government accused him of being a spy.

A provisional stay of Jadhav’s death sentence was imposed in 2017 as a result of Harish Salve’s persuasive arguments while representing India before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It’s interesting that the sole legal fee he assessed was Re 1.

Salve was one of the attorneys representing the Hindu side in the Ram Janmabhoomi controversy in the Ram temple dispute. The Supreme Court mandated in 2019 that a Ram temple be built at the contentious Ayodhya location.

Tata Sons v. Cyrus Mistry: In the Supreme Court in 2016, Harish Salve acted as Tata Sons’ representative. The court upheld the Tata Group’s decision to dismiss Cyrus Mistry from his position as executive chairman of Tata Sons thanks to his skillful arguments and legal approach.

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