Subhas Anandan

Subhas Anandan (25 December 1947 – 7 January 2015) was a Singaporean criminal lawyer, who was known to have represented criminals in many high-profile cases that occurred in Singapore.

At the time of his death, Anandan was the senior partner in law firm RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP and headed its department in criminal law.

He was a founding member and the first president of the Association of Criminal Lawyers of Singapore.

He was also the president of Cuesports Singapore, the national sports association for billiards, snooker, and pool.

Anandan was born on 25 December 1947 to Raman Anandan and Govindan Pushpanjaly in Travancore-Cochin (now Kerala, India).

When he was five months old, the family migrated from India to Singapore, where his father had found work as a clerk in the British Royal Navy.

In 1963, after achieving a first grade in his Senior Cambridge (now 'O' Level) examinations, he went back India to study medicine in Madras (now Chennai) under the request of his mother.

But after the first few lessons, he was convinced that he was not meant to be a doctor.

He returned home after three months and started his pre-university education at Raffles Institution in 1964.

After completing his Higher School Certificate (now 'A' Level) examinations, he wanted to join the police force but eventually enrolled in the University of Singapore (now National University of Singapore) at the insistence of his father.

While pursuing a degree in law, he participated in various extra-curricular activities, including playing on the university's football team and serving as secretary-general of the Socialists' Club.

In law school, he was a classmate of Lawrence Ang, who would become a future deputy public prosecutor in Singapore.

They lived in the staff quarters within the British naval base in Sembawang until his father retired in the early 1970s.

Anandan attended primary and secondary school in the naval base, first at Admiralty Asian School and then Naval Base School, where he excelled academically.

He obtained his law degree in 1970 and went on to become to the protégé of Chan Sek Keong, then a senior partner at law firm Shook Lin & Bok and, later, a Chief Justice of Singapore.

According to Anandan, his first murder case was in 1972, when he represented a man nicknamed "Tampines Rajah", who was sentenced

to hang for murdering a man nicknamed "Beatles Rajah"; the defendant, who was a known acquaintance of Anandan, had encouraged him to continue defending others and this led to Anandan continuing to defend suspects in capital cases throughout his 45-year-long legal career.

Anandan, who was formerly a stateless person, first applied for Singapore citizenship in 1972, but was informed a decade later that his application had been turned down.

In March 1976, Anandan was arrested by the police for suspected involvement in a secret society under the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act.

He was released from remand and exonerated in November of the same year following an investigation by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau.

The couple had a son, Sujesh Anandan (born in 1990 or 1991), who also became a lawyer like his father.

On 31 October 2000, he was killed along with 82 other passengers and crew in the crash of Singapore Airlines Flight 006 at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in Taipei, Taiwan.

Anandan started the Association of Criminal Lawyers of Singapore in 2002, with the goal of raising the number of criminal lawyers in the country.

He tried again 2002, and was then finally granted citizenship.

Subhas Anandan was married with Vimala Kesavan.

In 2011, Anandan, alongside law practitioners including Rajan Menon, founded RHTLaw TaylorWessing and stayed on as one of its senior partners until his death.

Anandan had started his practice handling mainly civil, accident and family cases but soon began gravitating towards criminal law.

In his lifetime, he had handled over a thousand criminal cases involving a wide range of crimes, including murder, rape, domestic worker abuse, drug trafficking and white-collar offences.

Known for his sharp and stinging attacks in the courtroom, he was nicknamed "the Basher" within the law community.

His presence in court had been characterised as intimidating, given his fierce stares and voluminous beard.

As one of Singapore's top criminal defence lawyers, he had appeared so frequently in the media that some people called him a "publicity hound".

While Anandan was critical of some aspects of the criminal justice system in Singapore, he believed that the system had to be followed.

He also had a personal mantra of "the most heinous offenders deserve their day in a court of law"; hence Anandan had claimed to have never rejected cases because of the offence the person had been charged with.

In 2013, Anandan was part of the 12-member steering committee to guide the development of the Singapore University of Social Sciences School of Law.

Towards the end of his life, Anandan's health began to deteriorate and he died of heart failure in January 2015.

He was survived by his wife and son, Sujesh Anandan, who is also a lawyer.

Sujesh was reportedly called to the Bar in early 2019.

Two of Anandan's nephews, Sunil Sudheesan and Anand Nalachandran, were also lawyers.

Of the two nephews, Sudheesan's mother is of Chinese descent.

Anandan's brother Surash was a football player and later worked as a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines.