Kapil Sibal

Kapil Sibal (born August 8, 1948, Jalandhar, India) is an Indian lawyer, politician, and government official who became a senior leader in the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). He was especially noted for his service as a cabinet minister in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government (2004–14).

Sibal was born to a distinguished lawyer and was raised in Punjab state, in northwestern India. He moved to Delhi in the mid-1960s to continue his education and completed degrees in history and law from the University of Delhi in the early 1970s. He also earned a law degree from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1977.

In 1973, after having declined an offer to join India’s civil service, Sibal established his own law practice. He built a highly successful legal career that included an appointment in 1989–90 as the additional solicitor general of India. In 1993 he successfully defended the chief justice of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana against impeachment proceedings in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament). Between 1995 and 2002 he served three times as the president of India’s Supreme Court Bar Association.

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Sibal became known as a specialist in constitutional law. On the basis of that reputation, he was nominated in 1998 to the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of India’s parliament), representing the Congress Party from Bihar state. In 2000–02 he served there as the secretary of Congress’s parliamentary membership. He decided to contest a seat in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections and won in a constituency in the Delhi national capital territory. He was reelected from that constituency in 2009.

Sibal’s 2004 win was part of the overall victory by the Congress-led UPA coalition, which then formed a government and began appointing Sibal to ministerial posts. He subsequently suspended his active law practice. His first cabinet-level assignments were in 2006, when he took on the portfolios for both science and technology and ocean development (the latter soon renamed earth sciences). In 2009 he became the minister for human resource development, and the following year, under his initiative, the parliament passed a law that required the government to provide free elementary education to all children between the ages of 6 and 14. In January 2011 Sibal was also made minister for communications and information technology, continuing on in that dual role until he relinquished the human resources development component in late 2012. Nonetheless, in May 2013 he was given the additional portfolio of law and justice. He remained in both posts until the UPA government left office in May 2014, following the landslide victory by the Bharatiya Janata Party in elections to the Lok Sabha held earlier that spring. He also lost his seat in parliament, but two years later he returned to the Rajya Sabha.

Sibal was renowned as an effective orator, and, in addition to his skills as an administrator, he developed a reputation as a troubleshooter for the government. In 2012 he led the UPA government’s negotiations with civil society groups to create consensus on India’s first anticorruption bill. That same year, under his initiative, the government modified portions of the Information Technology Act of 2000. An amendment to the act, enacted in 2008, had allowed authorities to screen social media status updates and implement Internet censorship, but widespread public criticism of such provisions prompted the government to place stricter rules on them.

In addition to writing numerous newspaper and journal articles, Sibal published two volumes of poetry, I Witness (2008) and My World Within (2012).

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