ON MAY 27, the Collegium, comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Vikram Nath, J.K. Maheshwari, B.V. Nagarathna and M.M. Sundresh recommended the elevation of five names. If the appointments are confirmed, the Supreme Court will function with a strength of 37 judges including the CJI, and one vacancy.
The list includes four sitting Chief Justices of High Courts and one senior advocate for elevation as judges to the Supreme Court. These are Justices Sheel Nagu, Shree Chandrashekhar, Sanjeev Sachdeva, Arun Palli, and Senior Advocate V. Mohana. None of them will be in line to eventually become Chief Justice of India, if appointed.
Here is a brief background on each of them.
1. Justice Sheel Nagu, Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court
Justice Sheel Nagu enrolled as an advocate in October 1987 and built his practice on the civil and constitutional sides at the Madhya Pradesh High Court in Jabalpur. There, he was elevated as an Additional Judge in May 2011 and confirmed as a Permanent Judge in May 2013. He was appointed Acting Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in May 2024.
Over a tenure of more than 12 years, he authored upwards of 499 reported judgments.
While serving at the Madhya Pradesh High Court, he passed notable orders concerning prison conditions and detainee rights. His Bench called for the establishment of a primary health centre within jail campuses, equipped to treat serious ailments including heart, kidney, and liver conditions, reflecting a concern for the dignity and welfare of prisoners.
He also drew attention for rulings in matrimonial disputes where his Bench held that a wife’s refusal of physical intimacy could constitute cruelty, and that failing to show adequate respect toward a husband and his family could amount to mental cruelty sufficient to justify dissolution of marriage.
He was sworn in as the 36th Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court on July 9, 2024.
There, he took suo motu cognizance of various issues including the non-payment of honorarium to over 50,000 anganwadi workers. His Bench also ruled against charging parking fees from litigants, advocates, and court staff visiting the High Court, and had also flagged that district court infrastructure across Punjab and Haryana was not disabled-friendly. Infamously, his Bench acquitted Gurmit Ram Rahim in the 2002 Journalist murder case that had drawn significant public attention.
Justice Nagu has also headed benches in politically sensitive matters connected to AAP leaders and individuals who later shifted allegiance to the BJP. These include Sandeep Pathak’s case, where the Court granted protection against coercive action; Rajinder Gupta’s security cover petition and Trident Limited’s challenge to Punjab Pollution Control Board action. He was also part of the committee that investigated allegations against Justice Yashwant Varma after burnt currency notes were discovered at his official residence during a firefighting operation.
Justice Nagu is expected to serve approximately three years and seven months on the bench, retiring in December 2029.
The list included four sitting Chief Justices of High Courts and one senior advocate for elevation as judges to the Supreme Court.
2. Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court
Born in Ranchi, Justice Chandrashekhar completed his LL.B. from the Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi in 1993 and enrolled as an advocate the same year. He practised civil and criminal matters for nearly 19 years and conducted about 3500 cases, mostly in the Supreme Court. There are about 140 reported judgements of the Supreme Court in which he appeared as a counsel.
He was elevated as an Additional Judge of the Jharkhand High Court in January 2013 and confirmed as a Permanent Judge in June 2014. He briefly served as Acting Chief Justice of the Jharkhand High Court in December 2023 before being transferred to the Bombay High Court, where he was sworn in as its 49th Chief Justice in September 2025.
His Bench upheld the acquittal of all 22 accused police persons in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. In the same matter, he dismissed an interim application which sought to challenge the discharge of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who was one of the accused politicians, observing that the petition may have been filed by a political adversary. His Bench also quashed charges against the last four remaining accused in the 2006 Malegaon blasts case, quashed an FIR against former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey, and dismissed a PIL alleging misuse of taxpayer funds on Z+ security cover for RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. His Bench also refused to quash FIRs against BJP leaders, citing procedural grounds.
On the commercial side, his Bench set aside penalty demand notices issued by MMRDA related to BKC plots in a major business district, directing refunds of over Rs 700 crore to several entities including a large private conglomerate. In a significant environmental ruling, his Bench permitted the felling of over 45,000 mangroves for a proposed Versova–Bhayandar coastal road project.
Justice Chandrashekhar was also part of the three-member committee constituted by the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to investigate allegations of cash seizure against Justice Yashwant Varma.
Justice Chandrashekhar is expected to serve approximately three years and eleven months on the Supreme Court bench, retiring in May 2030.
3. Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court
Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva enrolled with the Bar Council of Delhi in 1988 and built a practice spanning district courts, the Delhi High Court, and the Supreme Court. He served as standing counsel for the Bar Council of India and as senior panel counsel for the Union of India for over a decade, before being designated a Senior Advocate by the Delhi High Court in July 2011.
He was elevated as an Additional Judge of the Delhi High Court in 2013, where he spent over a decade on the bench dealing primarily with taxation, criminal, civil, and commercial matters.
Among his notable rulings, he stayed a Central Information Commission order directing Delhi University to allow inspection of 1978 B.A. examination records, the year PM Narendra Modi is said to have graduated. He held that Tibetans born in India between 1950 and 1987 are Indian citizens. In 2018, he dismissed a petition by the Intelligence Bureau's central public information officer that sought to block disclosure of information related to alleged human rights violations involving a forest officer.
He was transferred to the Madhya Pradesh High Court in May 2024 and took charge as Acting Chief Justice a year later. He was appointed Chief Justice in July 2025. He had paused live-streaming for all criminal matters in September 2025 citing misuse of live-streamed court proceedings.
In April this year, he initiated suo motu contempt proceedings against BJP MLA Sanjay Pathak for allegedly attempting to contact a sitting judge in a mining case. Earlier this month, the Madhya Pradesh High Court Bar Association submitted a representation to him raising concerns about bail jurisprudence and procedural difficulties affecting access to justice.
Justice Sachdeva is expected to serve a tenure of over three and a half years, retiring in December 2029.
4. Justice Arun Palli, Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh
Justice Arun Palli, a fourth-generation lawyer, began his practice at the Punjab and Haryana High Court after completing his law degree in 1988, working across civil, criminal, constitutional, revenue, industrial, and labour matters.
He served as Additional Advocate General for Punjab from September 2004 to March 2007, before being designated a Senior Advocate in April 2007. He was elevated as a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in December 2013 and took charge as Chief Justice of the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court in April 2025.
His tenure at the J&K and Ladakh High Court has been marked by pointed interventions. In December 2025, he dismissed a PIL filed by former Chief Minister and PDP President Mehbooba Mufti seeking repatriation of undertrial prisoners from jails outside J&K, recording that the petition appeared to be filed for political advantage and to position Mufti as a champion of a particular demographic. He had observed that courts cannot be turned into platforms for political campaigns.
In the same month, his Bench took suo motu cognisance of a near-complete breakdown of emergency medical services at the Government Super Speciality Hospital in Jammu, reportedly caused by unpaid government dues of around Rs 30 crore. His Bench recently held that a disclosure statement by a co-accused, without any other incriminating material on record, cannot by itself be sufficient ground to deny bail to an accused charged under UAPA.
Justice Palli is expected to serve approximately three years and four months, retiring in September 2029.
These profiles become important precisely because there is little public clarity on what criteria ultimately weigh with the Collegium while recommending judges.
5. Senior Advocate V. Mohana
After Justice Indu Malhotra, Senior Advocate V. Mohana is the only second woman ever recommended by the Collegium for direct elevation from the Bar to the Supreme Court. She is also a first-generation lawyer. If appointed, she would become the 12th woman judge in the Court’s 76-year history!
Mohana graduated from Coimbatore Law College as part of the first batch of the five-year law course, between 1983 and 1988. After moving to Delhi, she entered the chambers of Senior Advocate C.S. Vaidyanathan before going on to work with K.K. Venugopal, the former Attorney General. She was designated a Senior Advocate by the Supreme Court in April 2015.
Her practice has spanned at least eight areas of law civil, criminal, constitutional, service, banking and SARFAESI, intellectual property, cybercrime, and corporate law, though she has built her reputation in constitutional and civil matters.
Among her most significant appearances was the litigation on permanent commission for women officers in the Indian Army, a case in which the Supreme Court ultimately directed the Army to grant permanent commission to Short Service Commission women officers. She also appeared in the 2015 NJAC case for the Union, in which the Supreme Court struck down the 99th Constitutional Amendment that sought to replace the Collegium system with an appointments body, holding that it violated the basic structure of the Constitution. She has also served as amicus curiae in several significant cases.
In a lesser-known episode, Mohana challenged the Supreme Court’s own criteria for allotting chambers to lawyers in which the Court imposed a cut-off date of June 30, 2016, requiring advocates to show a minimum of 50 appearances per year for two consecutive years within a specified window. Mohana had argued that a cut-off date for meeting appearance requirements was inherently unfair to newly designated Senior Advocates like herself, who could not have accumulated the requisite appearances within the specified window.
V. Mohana is likely to serve a tenure of approximately five years on the Supreme Court bench upon her appointment, retiring in June 2031. She will also share the bench with Justice K.V. Viswanathan, a classmate from Coimbatore Law College and himself a direct Bar appointee, reuniting two lawyers who had entered the same chambers over three decades ago.
These profiles become important precisely because there is little public clarity on what criteria ultimately weigh with the Collegium while recommending judges. Questions continue to persist over supersessions, regional representation, ideological leanings, political sensitivity of judgments, and the relative weight accorded to seniority versus merit.
While the Collegium has provided some explanation in the past, today it rarely provides a substantive account of why one judge was preferred over another or what considerations are made while recommending them.