NEW DELHI: Senior lawyer and Congress Rajya Sabha member from Madhya Pradesh, Vivek Tankha played a crucial role in formulating his party’s strategy for the state that eventually led to the party coming to power there after a long gap of 15 years.
Tankha, who was sent to the Rajya Sabha by the Congress in 2016, worked in the background as a member of the election campaign committee and vice chairman of the manifesto committee. He also advised his old friend and now Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Kamal Nath on policy, and electoral and legal issues in the run-up to the elections.
Congress leaders say that it was because of pressure from former Congress spokesperson K.K. Mishra and that of Tankha, who fought the battle in court, that Vyapam became a national issue.
“In Tankha we had a very strong legal voice who was well versed with the details of the case and was not intimidated by the tactics of the legal team of the state’s BJP government. Apart from engaging him in Vyapam, we had the comfort of taking advices from him on various other issues related to the BJP government which kept the BJP on tenterhooks”, a Bhopal based party leader recalled.
Party leaders said that since Tankha has cordial relations with all the three Congress leaders of Madhya Pradesh, Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia, his advices are taken seriously by every leader in the state. “During his RS election, he faced no resistance from any of the three leaders despite not being too close to any of the three. In fact it was Kamal Nath who dialled Mayawati and enlisted the support of her MLAs so that Tankha could win the close fight”, a legal associate of Tankha said.
Tankha had earlier unsuccessfully contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Jabalpur.
A Kashmiri Pandit, Tankha was appointed as the MP advocate general in 1999 by Digvijaya Singh and was later made the additional solicitor general, the third ranking lawyer of Government of India and the first ever from MP, by the UPA government in 2009. Tankha’s father-in-law, Ajay Mushran was the finance minister in the Digvijaya Cabinet in the late 1990s and early 2000 and had made the record of presenting the state budget 10 times.
His father, R.K. Tankha was a judge in the MP High Court. After completing his degree from Delhi University’s Faculty of Law, Vivek Tankha enrolled as a lawyer in 1979 and became the youngest Advocate General of MP in 1999. A trust in the name of his father runs various schools for the mentally ill and disabled kids in MP and Chhattisgarh.