Last August, the Hindustan Times reported that during the deliberations of the Supreme Court Collegium on the proposed elevation of Justice V.M. Pancholi, then Chief Justice of the Patna High Court, Justice B.V. Nagarathna, the lone woman judge in the Court at the time, had submitted a dissenting note arguing against his elevation. The reason? Not only was there a non-routine transfer, but he also ranked as low as 57th on the all-India seniority list of judges, far too low to be considered for elevation to the Supreme Court.
At the time, we put focus on what was, surely, the weightiest issue at stake: Justice Pancholi was set to be, because of this out-of-turn elevation, a future Chief Justice of India – beginning from October 2031, and it was one more, of a string of elevations, where it seemed that future CJIs were almost being cherrypicked, and without explanation. Almost a year later, supersession in appointments, and with complete opacity, continues to dominate the conversation around the judiciary.
Earlier today, five new judges took oath to the Supreme Court after their appointment was notified by the government, greenlighting the Collegium’s recommendations last week. The Court’s quorum had increased by four judges through an ordinance, earlier in May. There are no future chief justices in this lineup. But two of these appointments – of Justices Shree Chandrashekhar and Arun Palli – came by superseding senior judges from those very High Courts. Over time the Collegium itself has become more tight-lipped, with CJI B.R. Gavai’s tenure seeing the re-introduction of perfunctory collegium statements — a single page note conveying the Collegium’s wide-reaching decisions, deep deliberations on the future of the Court in as few words as possible. The Collegium Resolutions that once conveyed with clarity and substance how seniority, merit and diversity — regional, religion, gender, marginalised caste background — shaped these decisions, have seemed to have lost their administrative relevance.
The groundbreaking outcomes of a vocal, public facing Collegium are difficult to offset. In January 2023, which was also the last time the Collegium had reiterated a recommendation for appointment which was in foul with the executive’s desire, the Collegium of CJI D.Y. Chandrachud and Justices S.K. Kaul and K.M. Joseph had lauded the recommendee Saurabh Kirpal’s openness about his sexuality: “In view of the constitutionally recognized rights which the candidate espouses, it would be manifestly contrary to the constitutional principles laid down by the Supreme Court to reject his candidature on that ground.”
Today, very little of that frankness remains. Justice G.S. Sandhawalia, the Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court who was superseded in the latest round of decisions could have been the first Sikh judge elevated since CJI J.S. Khehar, who had retired from the Supreme Court in 2017. And while today’s appointment brings senior advocate V. Mohana to the bench, an honest question to raise would be why there was only one woman appointee among five new judges? Will the Collegium under CJI Surya Kant recommend – among the five remaining judges it will appoint before his retirement – the three women Chief Justices leading our High Courts, bringing up, for the first time in the Court’s history, women’s representation on the bench to five? If it does not, will it even explain?
Dive deep into the latest appointments – the supersessions, why Justice Mohana’s appointment matters, and more – with our desk report.
There are interesting facts to know about the new lot at the Bench. Justice Chandrashekhar, during his time at the Bombay High Court, acquitted 22 accused police persons in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case just last month. Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva had passed an order halting the Central Information Commission from inspecting the Delhi University exam records of PM Modi. Justice Arun Palli dismissed a PIL by Mehbooba Mufti seeking repatriation of undertrials from prisons outside J&K, and Justice Mohana once represented the Union in the NJAC case.
Dive deep into the careers of the new appointees in this report to know more.
What the SC’s latest bail ruling says and does not say
One of May’s most important rulings was the Court’s decision in Syed Iftikar Andrabi (2026) which raised serious reservations against a different bench’s decision in January denying bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. Subsequently, a bench has referred the issue of Article 21’s contest with bail under UAPA to a larger bench. But the Andrabi decision spotlights some less-noticed concerns of UAPA and bail – like why technically inadmissible evidence like police confessions are being treated, repeatedly, as prima facie proof to offset grant of bail? Lawyer and researcher Sarthak Gupta, in this latest essay, calls this ‘admissibility blind’ bail adjudication – a new frontier in our understanding of how liberty under the terror statute is being construed.
‘The DV Act is a huge law with great significance, and it is under threat’
The seventh, May month, issue of ‘Staying Alive’ a special series on twenty years of the Domestic Violence Act brings a sharp read on Asmita Basu’s sit down with Bebaak Collective’s Hasina Khan as she speaks on how Muslim women strategically claimed protection under the Act, how feminist groups can keep the State accountable, and the legal and political developments that threaten the law. Read the full interview.
Editor’s Pick - May
This month, I am reading journalist Rahul Bhatia’s larger-than-life excavation of India’s continuing death as a democracy – ‘The Identity Project’, released in August 2024. There are many contexts which make the book a timely read in May – not least of which, was a thriller election in West Bengal built on the back of a dehumanising SIR exercise that left 90 lakh people out of voter eligibility. Bhatia’s expedition through a spiralling India, that exposes the wounds upon a people’s identity – from Aadhar to the CAA protests – lives in the dystopian news coming from Bengal of holding centres to detain ‘Bangladeshis’ in Malda and Murshidabad, detaining, as of yesterday, almost 400 people, and of the new government’s confirmation that SIR-excluded people will not get welfare benefits in the state.
Bhatia’s walkthrough across the ruins of riot stricken north-east Delhi after the 2020 pogrom, collecting grim stories of senseless violence, also captures the many faces of disenfranchisement, key to which has been polarisation caused from hateful, genocidal speeches targeted against communities. He writes, for instance, of the then BJP MLA Kapil Mishra, now Delhi’s law minister – ‘a modern arsonist whose main weapons were suggestion and misinformation on social media and among crowds’ – calling for a Hindu ecosystem of ‘intellectuals’ to churn out extremely hateful art, jokes, factoids. “A message could be as simple as a picture of a bearded man wearing a skullcap, crying that he hadn’t eaten meat that day. A series of pejoratives – circumcised, or mullah, or ‘puncturewaala’ – were deployed in a call to boycott a Muslim superstar’s film.”
One important afterlife of Bhatia’s book would be the role the Supreme Court has played in enabling this eroding of the personhood of millions – from losing the right to vote, to redress against hate. We are reading Bhatia’s book because in the span of five weeks, in a complete dismissal of literature, journalism and warnings on the state of things, the Supreme Court not only upheld the validity of the Bihar SIR (our report explores how the Court actually blurred the boundaries between electoral eligibility and nationality), but also gave a clean chit to BJP leaders in a hate speech case, ruling that there was no legislative vacuum on hate speech. Our analysis, from May first week, on why that is an incorrect approach sheds light on how what the Court chooses not to do, reveals a lot about how in the project of unmaking identity in a changing India, the judiciary is just as much at the forefront of the story.
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