Editor,
The Supreme Court Collegium system reveals a profound paradox at the heart of the higher judiciary: a system where the Supreme Court fiercely guards judicial review as a check on executive excess, yet completely insulates its own appointment process from the exact same scrutiny.
This insulation is built on the troubling premise that judicial selection is entirely beyond review, operating on a self-declared claim that the assessment of merit and integrity is a matter for the collegium alone. Historically, this controversial mechanism is a pure judicial creation rather than a constitutional mandate, having been carved out of the Second Judges Case (1993) amidst institutional anxieties. Even at its inception, prominent legal minds fiercely contested this shift; Justices AM Ahmadi and MM Punchhi dissented, warning that the Court should not read into the Constitution what it does not contain, while the legendary constitutional scholar HM Seervai delivered a scathing indictment, labelling the judgment “a low point of judicial competence.” Despite these grave warnings, the Third Judges Case in 1998 further entrenched this judicial primacy, expanding the non-constitutional body to five senior judges.
The operational reality of this system exposes severe vulnerabilities, primarily characterised by weak accountability, questionable appointments, and arbitrary omissions. The collegium operates entirely behind closed doors, completely devoid of publicly articulated criteria for elevating one judge while rejecting another.
By shunning transparency and rarely disclosing dissenting opinions, the system actively fuels widespread allegations of arbitrariness, favouritism and nepotism, while casting a dark shadow over regional and community representation. Defenders of the status quo disingenuously frame this absolute secrecy as a necessary feature to ward off political pressure and media noise.
However, history shows that even brief experiments with transparency—such as the 2017 initiative to publish resolutions following public scrutiny—were short-lived. By 2019, detailed reasonings were quietly abandoned in favour of bare announcements that hide dissenting views and reveal only final names. This persistent culture of “judges appointing judges” leaves the public with an echo chamber that resists outside sunlight, proving that the system remains too imperfect to ignore and far too flawed to remain as is.
Yours etc.,
Rajiv Roy
