SC Judge Slams Collegium Opacity, Warns Against Unconstitutional Judicial Appointments

DNI SUMMARY — KEY POINTS

• Supreme Court Justice Ujjal Bhuyan has publicly criticized the current Collegium system for its lack of transparency in judicial appointment processes.
• The judge noted that the last three Collegium resolutions failed to provide any reasons for appointments, marking a concerning shift toward institutional secrecy.
• Justice Bhuyan warned that this opacity allows individuals holding unconstitutional and potentially discriminatory views to enter the judiciary without proper public scrutiny.
• Legal scholars and the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy supported the call for greater disclosure to ensure merit-based selection and constitutional accountability.
• The judiciary is expected to face mounting pressure to codify selection criteria and justify its decisions to maintain public trust in the institution.

Supreme Court Justice Ujjal Bhuyan has launched a sharp critique regarding the evolving opacity within the judicial appointment process, cautioning that the lack of stated reasons for candidate selection undermines public confidence. Speaking at a high-profile legal event, he argued that the Collegium system has increasingly retreated from its duty to provide transparency, potentially jeopardizing the constitutional integrity of the bench. By failing to justify appointments, the institution allegedly shields itself from necessary public debate while inadvertently allowing the elevation of candidates whose personal views might clash with fundamental legal values.

Arguments for Transparency

Arguments for Transparency

The recent decline in transparency follows a pattern where the last three resolutions issued by the collegium contained no substantive explanation for the selections made. Justice Bhuyan explicitly contrasted this with older practices, where resolutions, despite being formulaic, provided at least a baseline rationale for each recommendation. He emphasized that this withdrawal into secrecy is a profound disservice to highly qualified judges who deserve recognition for their merit and diligent work. According to the judge, public disclosure of reasoning should be viewed as a vital check, rather than an administrative burden or an intrusion into institutional autonomy.

Accountability and Oversight

The core of the controversy involves the risk of elevating individuals who harbor biased or discriminatory viewpoints that are entirely incompatible with constitutional mandates. Justice Bhuyan highlighted alarming instances where individuals appointed to high judicial offices have made dehumanizing remarks, such as comparing communities to ants, without facing immediate consequences or scrutiny during their selection. By maintaining a shroud of silence, the appointment process fails to filter out such unsuitable candidates. The lack of open discussion during the vetting phase acts as an enabling factor for these individuals to gain positions of significant power.

Accountability and Oversight

Rethinking Judicial Procedures

Justice Bhuyan expressed a strong desire to normalize public debate around the qualifications and prior judgments of potential judges before they are seated on the bench. He questioned why the appointment process remains so intensely insulated from the society it serves, suggesting that informed public scrutiny is the only way to safeguard constitutional values. The judge maintained that citizens possess a fundamental right to understand the reasoning behind why specific individuals are entrusted with interpreting the law. This demand for openness challenges the long-standing tradition of internal deliberation that has historically defined the collegium's internal workings.

Beyond appointments, the discourse at the Vidhi Centre’s event reflected broader anxieties regarding the judiciary's struggle to embrace transparency in its constitutive processes. While the courts have achieved significant milestones by implementing live-streaming for adjudicatory proceedings, they remain remarkably defensive regarding their administrative decisions. This duality creates a fractured image of the institution, where public-facing trial rooms operate under modern transparency standards while the back-end recruitment of judges remains trapped in legacy protocols. The gap between these two operational realities is growing increasingly difficult for the legal establishment to justify.

Restoring Institutional Trust

Rethinking Judicial Procedures

The demand for reform is not merely a critique of individual resolutions but a fundamental challenge to the way power is dispensed within the judicial ecosystem. Justice Bhuyan’s call for a Judicial Transparency Index serves as a baseline for measuring how much information is actually accessible to the common citizen. Without a codified, transparent mechanism, the collegium remains vulnerable to claims of favoritism and lack of accountability. The judge's intervention signals a potential internal shift, where members of the highest court are beginning to prioritize public legitimacy over the comfort of traditional secrecy.

The potential for reform rests on the ability of the legal fraternity to force a shift toward a more inclusive and reasoned selection model that prioritizes individual merit over institutional loyalty. Justice Bhuyan advocated for the adoption of clearer guidelines that would force the collegium to document its reasoning for every rejection or elevation. By documenting these processes, the institution could move toward an era where the public can verify the integrity of the judicial selection pipeline. Such a transformation is deemed essential to stop the erosion of trust currently affecting several legal corridors in the country.

Restoring Institutional Trust

Ultimately, the controversy underscores a pivotal moment for the Indian judiciary as it navigates the tension between internal autonomy and public expectations. The warning against allowing biased figures to reach the bench is a direct appeal to the collective conscience of the judiciary to prioritize constitutional fidelity above all else. Whether the collegium decides to adopt these transparency standards remains to be seen, but the push for institutional evolution is now firmly part of the national legal agenda. The path forward requires a balance between necessary confidentiality and the democratic imperative for accountability.