The statement was precise, deliberate, and impossible to read as anything other than a challenge from within. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan of the Supreme Court of India has said publicly that collegium resolutions were earlier accompanied by reasons — even if not exhaustive ones — and that citizens have a right to know the basis on which judges are appointed to the country's highest courts. The remark did not arrive in a vacuum. It lands in the middle of a constitutional argument that has been running, in various registers, for three decades.
The collegium — an informal body comprising the Chief Justice of India and the four most senior Supreme Court judges — has governed judicial appointments since the Supreme Court effectively transferred that power to itself through a sequence of judgments in the 1990s known collectively as the Three Judges Cases. No statute created the collegium. No statute defines how it must deliberate, what criteria it must apply, or what it must disclose. Its resolutions, when they emerge, have historically read more like dispatch notes than reasoned orders.
What Bhuyan Said, and Why It Matters
The weight of Justice Bhuyan's assertion lies not simply in a judge wanting more transparency. Judges have called for institutional reform before. The weight is in the admission: that the collegium once offered reasons, however thin, and that the practice has eroded. That is institutional regression, not a demand for untried reform. It means the floor existed — and was abandoned.
Constitutional law scholars have long argued that reasoned orders are the minimum condition of democratic legitimacy for any body exercising public power. The collegium appoints judges who will determine the fate of property disputes, criminal convictions, electoral outcomes, and the boundaries of fundamental rights. That it does so through resolutions that the public cannot examine is, in the framing of scholars who have written on this subject, a defect in democratic architecture.
The argument from the judiciary's defenders runs differently: published reasoning would expose the deliberative process to political attack, governments would use disclosed criteria to reject nominees whose reasoning did not suit executive preference, and collegium confidentiality insulates the bench from patronage. There is something to this. But the argument proves too much. By the same logic, no regulatory body should publish its reasoning, no cabinet committee should minute its disagreements, no court should explain its judgments. The argument for opacity, taken seriously, dissolves the entire architecture of accountable governance.
The NJAC Shadow
The last time Parliament tried to restructure judicial appointments, it passed the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act in 2014, creating a six-member body that would include the Chief Justice, two senior Supreme Court judges, the Law Minister, and two eminent persons. The Supreme Court struck it down in 2015, holding that the NJAC threatened judicial independence by giving the executive a decisive voice — and a veto — over appointments. The judgment was five-to-zero, but it was not unanimous in spirit. Justice J. Chelameswar dissented, arguing that the collegium system's opacity was itself a constitutional problem the NJAC might have addressed.
That dissent has never fully disappeared. It surfaces whenever a collegium recommendation sits unprocessed in the Law Ministry for months, whenever a name is mysteriously dropped from a reiterated list, whenever a judge known for inconvenient rulings finds his elevation stalled. The government's tool, in the absence of a formal veto, has been administrative delay — a slow lever, but a lever nonetheless. The Supreme Court has expressed displeasure at recommendations left pending. The tension has never produced a structural resolution.
Justice Bhuyan's intervention suggests a different path. Rather than a legislative overhaul — which the court would likely resist — he is suggesting the collegium reform itself from within, restoring the practice of reasoned resolutions that apparently existed in an earlier period. This is institutional self-correction, not external imposition. It is also, politically, the harder ask: it requires the collegium to accept a discipline it has no formal obligation to accept.
The Pendency Problem Is Not Separate
India's courts carry a backlog of more than fifty million pending cases. That figure is not a footnote to this debate — it is the context in which every argument about judicial appointments takes on urgency. The quality, quantity, and speed of appointments to the High Courts and the Supreme Court has a direct bearing on how fast that backlog moves. Vacancies in High Courts have, at various points, run into the hundreds. Each unfilled seat is a docket that does not move, a bail application that waits, a property dispute that outlives the original litigants.
The opacity of the collegium process makes it harder to diagnose why vacancies persist. When a name is rejected or delayed, neither the Bar nor the public knows whether the objection was professional, personal, or political. Published reasoning would not eliminate friction — but it would change its nature. A government that objects to a nominee on stated grounds can be held to account for those grounds. A government that objects through administrative silence cannot.
This is where the transparency argument connects to something larger than procedure. The legitimacy of any judicial appointment rests on the perception that it was made on merit, through a process that — even if imperfect — was not arbitrary. When the public cannot examine the reasoning, that perception has no foundation it can inspect. It must simply be trusted. And trust is not an inexhaustible resource.
What a Reform Path Could Look Like
The collegium need not publish deliberative minutes to provide meaningful transparency. It could publish the criteria it applies — seniority, integrity, professional standing, representation of the Bar versus the district judiciary — and indicate, in broad terms, why a recommendation meets or does not meet those criteria. This falls well short of a judicial opinion; it resembles the kind of reasoning a Public Service Commission provides when selecting senior civil servants. It is not a radical idea. It is a minimal standard.
The structural difficulty is that any move toward formal disclosure norms requires either a collegium resolution — which needs consensus among five judges — or a legislative framework — which the Supreme Court might again strike down. A Parliamentary Standing Committee examination of collegium functioning, drawing on the Bar Council, law commissions, and independent constitutional scholars, would be constitutionally legitimate without requiring either a court order or an act that the court would resist. It would give the process something it currently lacks: a deliberative space that is neither purely judicial nor purely executive.
Justice Bhuyan has not proposed all of this. He has said something simpler: citizens have a right to know. That sentence, coming from inside the institution, is the beginning of a pressure the collegium will find harder to deflect than anything Parliament has sent its way in years. Whether the institution responds with the self-correction it is capable of, or waits for the next constitutional confrontation to force the issue, will say a great deal about whether India's judiciary can reform itself on the same terms it holds others to — openly, with reasons, in public.
