IN DECEMBER 2025, the Supreme Court of India, led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant passed a historic decision, reserving fifty percent posts in all State Bar Councils for women. The Court passed these directions in a Public Interest Litigation, pointing out that the percentage of women representatives in the bar council was far smaller than the number of women practicing at the Bar.
The Court’s view was motivated to rectify the skewed ratio that resulted from gender bias, of the male-dominated bar against women candidates, which made it tough for women to compete without reservation with men in bar elections. The enthusiasm with which women lawyers have welcomed this opening, is evident from the large number of women who have stood as candidates in the Bar Council Election. For instance, since the 1960s, the Delhi Bar Council has only elected two women lawyers. But last February almost 80 women candidates contested and 30 percent of the Bar Council will consist of women for the first time in India’s history.
In many ways, a similar change has unfolded as far as the designation of women lawyers as senior advocates by various High Courts and the Supreme Court is concerned. Over the past four decades, most courts had designated only two or so women. This shift did not occur through reservations, but through the Supreme Court’s decision in Indira Jaising v. Supreme Court of India (2017) (‘Indira Jaising - I’), which set up, for the first time, an objective marking framework to assess candidates applying for designation (although on subjective satisfaction of the Permanent Committee). Following Indira Jaising - I, one witnessed a significant increase in the number of women being designated. In subjective systems, women tend to be more invisible and vulnerable to gender bias. However, one could argue, the more objective the selection system, the less the bias finds space to operate.
The enthusiasm with which women lawyers have welcomed this opening, is evident from the large number of women who have stood as candidates in the Bar Council Election.
Enthused by these successes, there is a clamouring from the women’s bar to ensure that elevation to the bench is made more inclusive by ensuring that more women are elevated to both the High Court and Supreme Court. This would not just encourage women professionals but would also ensure that the justice system benefits from diversity.
While this process of gender equity in Courts at all levels is a laudable tribute to the promise of our great Constitution, which has promised all citizens a right to equality to ensure that no one is discriminated solely on the ground of gender, one does observe with some discomfort that a significant majority of the women who are able to partake in the opportunities that have expansively emerged are Hindu Upper Caste, upper middle class women, often belonging to legal families or having powerful male mentors. On the other hand, women lawyers from marginalised castes, lower middle-class families and minority communities, though managing to survive in the profession through sheer grit and hard work, have not been able to thrive or benefit from this opening space for women lawyers created by judgments of the Supreme Court and changing attitudes of the Collegium and Full Court towards women.
Embedding intersectionality in the assertion for representation
Kimberlie Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and scholar, in 1989, coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in feminism, which envisages a framework for understanding how women’s experiences of oppression are shaped by intersecting gender, race, social, ability and sexuality identities. In the Indian context, we can also consider caste and religious identity as compounding features of social oppression of women professionals.
While mainstream feminism, described by Crenshaw as “White Feminism”, or feminism whose contours have been defined by women who have every privilege except that of gender, often fails to acknowledge the compounding effect of discrimination upon women who also face, class, caste and religious discrimination or marginalisation. We must note that this form of elite feminism can be as oppressive to women who are confronting additional, severe forms of discrimination, owing to the multiple marginalised identities they represent.
It is crucial that in this moment in our history, while the Supreme Court is seeking to correct the gender divide, it also accounts that gender inclusion is informed by intersectional feminism, which acknowledges that the anti-discrimination discourse must not only be gender based but also account for the more complex realities faced by women lawyers. The anti-discrimination discourse must ensure that gender inclusion is not dominated by socially privileged women. It would be crucial to not perpetuate cycles of entitlement and blind to social inequities one may be exploitatively benefitting from.
Rethinking ‘merit’
The often touted ‘merit’ argument, is only to be rejected in a system wherein opportunity and selection are based on highly subjective criteria, one that is rarely justified through any objective logic. Across vast sections of the Indian bar, ‘merit’ has been a euphemistic presentation of deeply entrenched structures of nepotism.
This is, notably, not to argue that women lawyers, including myself, lack the absolute, or relative (compared to male lawyers) merit, but to additionally account for several women lawyers who are equally, and often, much more meritorious but did not have access to opportunities owing to entrenched social structures. Structural acknowledgement that women belonging to deprived classes, castes and minorities have access to less opportunities and have a smaller social network for rising in the profession could inspire concerted effort to ensure that when representation of women does increase as a result of assertion by women lawyers, it is also ensured that women from diverse castes, religious identities and sexual orientations, as well as women with disabilities receive fair representation. That, indeed, would be true feminism. One also hopes that when diversity achieves this depth, it will ensure that selection of men would also be informed by such diversity and not dominated by Hindu Upper Caste Men at all levels.
Structural reform for intersectional representation on the bar and the bench
Some solutions to secure this form of intersectional feminism, is first to acknowledge that the anti-discrimination discourse by compartmentalising gender as a separate category of discrimination from other forms of marginalisation, is in fact putting women from deprived castes, minority religions and those with disability at a disadvantage. It also makes the compounded challenge they face invisible. For example, simply because the Delhi High Court has had twenty women judges appointed since 2020 does not mean that the judges selection is no longer pitted with bias, especially when the women candidates predominately come from the privileged caste, class or religious back grounds.
According to the ‘State of the Judiciary’ report published in November 2023, appointment of judges in Delhi’s lower courts, which occurs through an objective system of selection involving a written exam followed by an interview, have seen 44 percent women judges. Unfortunately, there are statistics available to determine whether women candidates who face layered oppression have found proportionate representation through the judicial services. Acknowledgement that even among women we face different degrees of privileges could contribute towards greater discourse pushing for such data to be synthesised so that they provide a transparent, and holistic picture of the state of women’s representation in the Indian judiciary.
For example, simply because the Delhi High Court has had twenty women judges appointed since 2020 does not mean that the judges selection is no longer pitted with bias.
In this sense, as far as meaningful intersectional representation in the bar is concerned, of inspiration are the salient features of the guidelines adopted by the King’s Counsel Selection Panel, an independent body that awards appointment of King’s Counsels, a rendition of senior designation in the United Kingdom. In its assessment framework, the Panel also includes criteria for emphasis on obtaining representation from all quarters while inviting applications, including women, LGBT communities and other ethnicities and persons with disability. In India also the Full Court ought to ensure that while inviting applications for designation, they should emphasise and ensure that diversity in terms of gender also includes diversity of caste, religion, class, thus ensuring that women experiencing multi-dimensional discrimination are visible.
Further to ensure opportunities are spread to women lawyers of all classes, castes and religions, the Bar Council of India can offer incentives to private firms to hire and train more women from Dalit, Scheduled Tribe and minority backgrounds. At the same time, governments, both at the Union and state levels, must work towards securing 33 percent representation of women (and keeping the concern of intersectionality in mind) in government panels, to ensure true diversity and social empowerment of women.
Similarly in elevation of women judges, both at the High Court and the Supreme Court, intersectional lack of privilege needs to be kept in mind. This would ensure that not only would we be soon seeing our first woman Chief Justice of India, but also soon thereafter, our first Dalit and minority women Chief Justices of India.
Feminism cannot just be about increasing the number of women, but it also has to be about decreasing the level of discrimination. If, as feminist lawyers, we wish to challenge patriarchal structures that define access and success, we need to embrace intersectionality in feminism, so that we do not, in our quest for representation in the profession, perpetuate similar cycles of privilege.