A Bombay High Court division bench of Justice Anil Kilor and Justice Nivedita Mehta has referred Advocate Santosh Damodar Chande to the Bar Council of Maharashtra & Goa (BCMG) for disciplinary action after he was caught appearing for six parties he never formally represented, and then compounding the deception with fabricated claims and false citations. The referral carries immediate professional consequences, with the Bar Council directed to conclude its inquiry preferably within four months.
The trouble began during the hearing of a petition filed by one Pushpa Gupta, seeking removal of encroachments on government land by seven private respondents. At a March 30, 2026 hearing, Chande stood before the bench and declared he represented all seven private parties, simultaneously producing what the court flagged as a forged document purporting to establish their possession of the disputed land for over four decades, a claim serious enough to trigger contempt of court notices against those very respondents. The Court had twice passed orders on that basis. Then, at the April 9 hearing, Chande quietly walked back his earlier position, informing the bench he held a Vakalatnama for only one respondent, Respondent, and had never been authorised to appear for the remaining six.
The bench found Chande's mid-case reversal not merely procedurally irregular but deliberately misleading, noting that two prior court orders, including the contempt notices, had been issued under a false premise engineered by the advocate himself. The judges further found that Chande attempted yet another misdirection by arguing that a civil court had delivered judgments in two suits connected to the matter, a claim the bench flatly rejected after examining the records firsthand.
Invoking a pattern of prior transgressions that the court had previously overlooked, the bench declared, "The misconduct is, therefore, writ large... This is not the first instance in which the conduct of Chande has been found objectionable. On multiple prior occasions, similar incidents have been overlooked by the Court." The bench formally referred the matter to the BCMG with a directive to take action "as expeditiously as possible and preferably within four months."
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