Citizens Have a Right to Know Their Judges: Justice Bhuyan’s Blunt Message on Collegium Opacity

On August 1, 2023, Supreme Court judge Justice Ujjal Bhuyan stood before an audience of judges, senior advocates, and legal researchers at the India International Centre in New Delhi and did something judges rarely do in public: he turned the lens of transparency back onto the institution he serves. Delivering the keynote address at the launch of the Judicial Transparency Index, a report by the Vidhi Centre for Legal PolicyVidhi Centre for Legal PolicyAn independent legal think tank based in India, working to make better laws and improve governance for every Indian.‘s JALDI (Justice, Access and Lowering Delays in India) initiative, Justice Bhuyan used the occasion not merely to praise the report but to press for its next, more difficult frontier the opacity of the Supreme Court CollegiumSupreme Court CollegiumIn India, the Collegium system is how judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts are appointed and transferred. It consists of the Chief Justice of India and a few senior-most judges of the Supreme Court. itself.

A Report Built on 68 Indicators:

The Judicial Transparency Index, formally titled “Assessing Disclosure of Information by the Supreme Court and the High Courts,” is described as India’s first systematic attempt to measure judicial openness using spanning judicial processes, institutional governance and administration, and personnel matters. Research Fellows Abhishek Rath and Navami Krishnamurthy presented the report’s key findings, following a welcome address by Vidhi’s founder, Dr. Arghya Sengupta. The event brought together, among others, Senior Advocates Aditya Sondhi and Saurabh Kirpal for a panel discussion that followed Justice Bhuyan’s address.

While Justice Bhuyan called the initiative commendable, he was careful to frame it as a starting point rather than a finished exercise one that, in his own assessment, still leaves the judiciary’s most consequential and least visible process largely untouched.

The Collegium’s Growing Silence:

The heart of Justice Bhuyan’s address concerned the Supreme Court Collegium’s practice of recommending judges for elevation and transfer. He noted that deliberations on these decisions remain confidential, that reasons for rejecting or deferring a recommendation are rarely disclosed in full, and that the criteria applied are not codified in any publicly available instrument beyond the limited disclosures in the Memorandum of Procedure. He asked the JALDI team to consider including collegium opacity as a metric in future editions of the index.

What made his remarks notable was the specificity of his critique of recent practice. Justice Bhuyan observed that while earlier collegium resolutions at least contained some reasoning even if, as he acknowledged, occasionally formulaic the last three resolutions he had reviewed contained no reasons whatsoever. He posed this directly to the audience as a question about institutional backsliding, asking whether this represented a retreat from transparency rather than progress toward it.

A Cautionary Example:

To illustrate the stakes of opaque appointments, Justice Bhuyan pointed to a controversial 2024 speech by a former Allahabad High Court judge at a VHPVishwa Hindu ParishadA right-wing Hindu nationalist organization based in India, often associated with the Sangh Parivar. event, in which the judge made remarks widely criticised as carrying communal overtones about religious minorities. Justice Bhuyan argued that withholding reasons in collegium proposals cuts both ways: it does a disservice to genuinely outstanding judges whose elevation goes unexplained, while simultaneously creating room for individuals to enter the judiciary whose subsequent conduct proves incompatible with constitutional values. He asked, pointedly, what harm could possibly follow from informed public debate on such decisions.

He also revisited the case of Senior Advocate Saurabh Kirpal, whose recommendation for elevation to a High Court judgeship was reiterated by the Collegium but left uncleared by the Central government for an extended period. Justice Bhuyan remarked that he found the Collegium’s stated reasoning in that instance convincing a rare instance of a sitting Supreme Court judge publicly weighing in on the merits of a contested, unresolved appointment.

The Panel Pushes Further:

The discussion that followed broadened the debate considerably. Senior Advocate Kirpal agreed that reasons for elevation decisions should be substantive rather than formulaic, arguing that requiring genuine justification would also serve as an internal check on the Collegium, guarding against what critics have called arbitrary or capricious rejections. He suggested that the public is entitled to know what kind of individuals are being appointed to the highest levels of the judiciary so that citizens can form their own informed views.

Senior Advocate Sondhi offered a partial counterpoint, agreeing that disclosure of reasons is generally desirable but cautioning that certain grounds such as an income threshold sometimes applied in assessing a candidate’s suitability may not always reflect a lawyer’s actual competence, particularly for those who have built careers in civil rights, human rights, or labour law. In such cases, he suggested, withholding specific reasons may sometimes be appropriate. Sondhi also argued that the burden of transparency should not fall on the judiciary alone, pointing to instances where government files on reiterated collegium recommendations remain unmoved for years without public explanation.

Weighing Independence Against Accountability:

Justice Bhuyan was careful to address the tension between judicial independence and public accountability directly, rejecting characterisations of judicial power as an ‘unelected tyranny.’ Judges, he said, deserve institutional protection precisely because they lack the accountability mechanisms that apply to elected officials or to governments answerable through judicial review. But he argued that this very insulation places a correspondingly greater obligation on judges to be transparent their legitimacy and public confidence, in his framing, must come from a willingness to disclose information rather than from a claim to unquestioned authority.

Why This Matters Beyond Delhi:

For practitioners far from the Supreme Court’s own corridors, the collegium system can feel like a distant institutional debate. But its outcomes are not distant at all. Every High Court bench that hears a bail matter, a land dispute, or a criminal appeal in a district as far from Delhi as Chandauli is shaped, eventually, by decisions made inside that opaque process. A judiciary’s composition who is elevated, who is transferred, who is passed over and why filters down into the quality, temperament, and constitutional fidelity of judges hearing everyday cases across the country.

Justice Bhuyan’s remarks are also significant for coming from a sitting Supreme Court judge rather than from academic critics or civil society alone. Judicial self-criticism of this kind, delivered at a public forum and reported in detail, is comparatively rare in India, where collegium proceedings have historically been treated as an internal, largely unreviewable matter of judicial administration.

Whether the JALDI initiative takes up Justice Bhuyan’s suggestion to formally assess collegium transparency in its next index remains to be seen. What is clear is that the debate he reopened between the judiciary’s need for institutional insulation and its obligation to explain itself to the public it serves is unlikely to be settled by a single keynote address, however candid.