Subramaniam Hariharan Iyer

Little has been published about S.H. Iyer's childhood or family background, and his date of birth was not made public. Before becoming a lawyer he worked at The Times of India press in Ahmedabad, where he emerged as a union leader. The press workers at the newspaper were fragmented and paid uneven wages for exactly the same work. Iyer played a key role in organising them and in the later formation of a pan India federation of press workers, which ultimately led to improved conditions across the industry. That experience of organising workers shaped the rest of his life in law.

Iyer practised for decades as an advocate at the Gujarat High Court in Ahmedabad, primarily doing pro bono work for the indigent. Colleagues said he shunned every financial incentive, declined cases that would bring him money and never appeared for employers or the well off. He was associated with the Jan Sangharsh Manch, the Ahmedabad group led by Advocate Mukul Sinha, and with Colin Gonsalves's Human Rights Law Network, and was a senior activist in the Gujarat Federation of Trade Unions and the Gujarat Mazdoor Sabha.

His public interest petitions repeatedly won stays against demolition drives and rehabilitation for evicted slum dwellers; over the years some twenty thousand hutment dwellers kept their homes as a result. When the Gujarat government denied that manual scavenging still existed, he brought the cases of workers who had died in sewers, and in 2023 the High Court held that the heads of civic bodies would be liable for any future manual scavenging deaths. He won a landmark 2002 judgment for glass and quartz industry workers suffering from silicosis, secured a court ordered investigation into a Public Distribution System scam of more than one hundred crore rupees in Panchmahal district, and represented fishermen, vegetable vendors, disabled job seekers and workers in labour courts.

After the 2002 Gujarat riots he took on several high profile cases, including proceedings involving Maya Kodnani, and with Mukul Sinha appeared before the Nanavati Commission. He also wrote on law and labour, including essays on Special Economic Zones and their impact on workers published with the Human Rights Law Network.

Iyer lived simply. He travelled to court by bicycle, then by moped and finally by scooter, and friends who stayed at his home in Ahmedabad remembered his hospitality and his stories of the courtroom. He shared a chamber at the High Court for many years with the veteran human rights lawyer Mahesh C. Bhatt. Details of his family life were not widely published.

S.H. Iyer died in Ahmedabad on 4 November 2026 after a brief illness. His age was not reported. His death was announced by his comrades in the Jan Sangharsh Manch and the labour movement, and tributes were published by the activist Dr Suresh Khairnar in Countercurrents and by his chamber colleague Mahesh C. Bhatt in The Wire, who wrote that he had continued to work on court matters until his final days.

Iyer is remembered as one of the few lawyers in Gujarat who devoted an entire career to unpaid work for the poor. His legacy lies in the homes that were not demolished, the silicosis victims who were compensated, the sewer deaths that the state was forced to acknowledge and the many smaller cases in which vendors, fishermen and workers kept their livelihoods. Colleagues described him as a selfless messiah of the poor and marginalised whose courage and commitment would continue to inspire others.