New Delhi- The Supreme Court Collegium's latest recommendation of five names for elevation to the country's apex court, declared on 27 May, has drawn immediate flak from Dalit rights groups and constitutional scholars, once again reviving the long-standing criticism that India's judge-appointment mechanism systematically excludes Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates from the highest rungs of the judiciary.
The Supreme Court Collegium, headed by the Chief Justice of India, recommended the elevation of four Chief Justices of High Courts and one Senior Advocate as Judges of the Supreme Court. The recommendations, made during Collegium meetings held on 22 and 27 May, were officially declared on 27 May and will now be considered by the Union Government in accordance with the constitutional appointment process.
The names recommended are Justice Sheel Nagu, presently serving as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court; Justice Chandrashekhar, currently Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court; Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, serving as Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court; Justice Arun Palli, presently Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; and Senior Advocate V. Mohana, practising before the Supreme Court of India.
Not one of the five recommended names belongs to a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe community. The omission has reinvigorated a debate that has smouldered for decades in India's legal and civil society spaces: that the collegium system, opaque and self-referential by design, structurally perpetuates the dominance of savarna, or upper-caste, candidates in the apex judiciary.
The recommendation of V. Mohana has been noted as significant given that, at present, the Supreme Court has only one sitting woman judge, Justice B.V. Nagarathna, and if Mohana is appointed, the number of women judges would increase to two. While that dimension of representation has been acknowledged, no similar acknowledgement has accompanied the complete absence of SC or ST candidates, a silence that activists say speaks loudest of all.
The collegium system is a mechanism under which incumbent judges of the Supreme Court of India appoint judges to the judiciary. It originated from three Supreme Court judgments rendered in 1981, 1993, and 1998, collectively known as the Three Judges Cases, and the system is alleged to be nepotistic and has faced widespread condemnation.
The Collegium is a group headed by the Chief Justice of India, consisting of the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court, that decides appointments to the higher judiciary and the transfer of judges.
In the First Judges Case, S.P. Gupta v. Union of India in 1981, judges suggested the executive must have the biggest say in judicial appointments.
In the Second Judges Case in 1993, a nine-judge bench said that the CJI must be given priority in such appointments. This was reiterated in the Third Judges Case in 1998, and since then judges have been appointed by the collegium system.
The critical consequence of this self-appointing mechanism is that it finds no explicit mention in the Constitution. The lack of transparency has ignited fears of nepotism and elevation of judges based on personal relationships and past favours instead of merit or seniority, and despite widespread criticism, there has been no active attempt by the legislature or the executive to find a viable alternative.
Data reveals a significant skew in judicial appointments, with 79 percent of High Court judges appointed between 2018 and 2022 coming from upper-caste backgrounds, while marginalised communities remain underrepresented. The collegium, its critics argue, is not merely a procedural problem it is a caste problem.
The India Justice Report 2025, released in April of last year, provided the most current comprehensive picture of where things stand. Of 698 High Court judges appointed since 2018, only 22 are from Scheduled Castes and 15 belong to Scheduled Tribes. That combined figure of 37 out of 698 appointments represents roughly five percent for communities that together constitute over 24 percent of India's population.
Of the 221 names approved for High Court judgeships by the Supreme Court Collegium over the past two and a half years, only eight candidates belong to Scheduled Castes and seven to Scheduled Tribes, amounting to 3.6 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
Nationally, Scheduled Tribes form only 5 percent of district judges and Scheduled Castes only 14 percent, highlighting structural exclusion even at the lower rungs of the judiciary, well before one approaches the Supreme Court.
At the apex level, the pattern is even more concentrated. The first Dalit judge to have served as Chief Justice of India was K.G. Balakrishnan (2007) who retired on 11 May 2010. Justice B.R. Gavai became the second Dalit Chief Justice of India on May 14, 2025 and after his retirement in November 2025, there is only one Dalit judge, Justice P.B. Varale, at the Supreme Court. The latest round of five recommendations does not include any member from the Dalit or Adivasi community.
The mechanism by which the collegium operates makes structural reform difficult. Under Articles 124, 217, and 224 of the Constitution, there is no provision for reservation for any caste or class of persons in judicial appointments. In the present system of appointment through the Collegium, the onus to provide social diversity falls primarily on the judiciary itself, and the government cannot appoint any person as a High Court judge who is not recommended by the High Court Collegium or the Supreme Court Collegium.
This places the entire weight of diversity on an institution that, historically, has not treated it as a priority. The exclusion of marginalised communities from the higher judiciary aligns with the findings of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes in 2013, which observed that the judiciary has historically been dominated by social groups entrenched in caste prejudices. The lack of diversity on the bench not only limits representation but also increases the likelihood of judicial bias, as judges from privileged backgrounds may, consciously or unconsciously, align with the perspectives and interests of their own communities.
The collegium's opacity has led to nepotism, favouritism, and corruption within the judiciary, eroding public trust. Unlike judicial appointment mechanisms in other democracies such as the United States Senate confirmation process or the United Kingdom's Judicial Appointments Commission India's collegium operates without public scrutiny, formal criteria, or external oversight, and this lack of transparency allows familial and professional networks to dominate selections, often sidelining diverse or merit-based candidates.
At least 12 judges appointed in a recent period had close relatives in the judiciary, including fathers, brothers, or in-laws who are either currently or previously judges of High Courts or the Supreme Court, drawing attention to the issue of nepotism and the influence of family legacy in judicial appointments.
The criticism of the collegium from Dalit and Adivasi activists is not new to this recommendation. It is a structural critique that has been building for decades, and the latest recommendation has given it fresh urgency.
Dalit and Adivasi activists argue that the opacity of the collegium system has ensured that judges from marginalised communities: Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and religious minorities are mostly unrepresented in the higher judiciary. The dominance of upper-caste judges, they say, also affects the judgements passed by the courts, in matters such as reservations and caste-based atrocities.
Some Ambedkarites believe that even if a government-appointed system does not lead to more diversity, it is easier to hold the government accountable. Suraj Kumar Baudhh, founder of the Dalit rights organisation Mission Ambedkar, has articulated this position directly, stating that while the government can be questioned and voted out, the collegium cannot even be questioned.
Dr. Jitendra Meena, spokesperson for the Bharat Adivasi Party, has highlighted that none of the judges on a Constitution Bench that delivered a ruling affecting SC and ST communities were from SC or ST backgrounds, arguing this reflects a lack of understanding and empathy towards these communities.
The National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations (NACDAOR) had been among the most consistent voices demanding structural change. The NACDAOR called for the establishment of an Indian Judicial Service to recruit judicial officers and judges from all sections of society, with a target of 50 percent representation from SC, ST, and OBC categories in the higher judiciary, and pushed for immediate disclosure of caste-based data on SC/ST/OBC employees in government services.
Hansraj Meena, a prominent Adivasi activist, has previously used social media to directly label the collegium's approach as casteist, and the hashtag #Casteist_Collegium has been used on X (formerly Twitter) in connection with multiple rounds of collegium recommendations where no SC or ST candidate was forwarded.
"In the 90s, the collegium system was introduced to save the sinking Brahmanism. The collegium has no statutory recognition of any kind. It is patently against the Constituent Assembly, but Brahmanism had to be saved. That's why the #Casteist_Collegium was brought in."Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, in 1919, through the Government of India Act, imposed a restriction on Brahmins becoming judges by stating that Brahmins lack judicial character and the sense of impartiality," reads a January post from an Ambedkarite handle.
The May 2026 recommendations have revived similar online reactions, with Dalit rights accounts pointing out that the five names announced represent an unchanged pattern of exclusion despite years of criticism.
Scholars have pointed out that approximately 73 percent of India's undertrials and 60 percent of death row prisoners are from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or Other Backward Class communities, and that in most cases linked to caste, such as reservations and caste-related atrocities, the judiciary has taken a position opposite to the interests of these communities. The argument, made repeatedly by sociologists and Ambedkarite legal scholars, is that the composition of the bench is not a side issue, it directly shapes outcomes for the most marginalised litigants.
Despite the regularity of this criticism, no government has successfully enacted a reform that sticks. The National Judicial Appointments Commission, or NJAC, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015, and the collegium was restored to its position of near-absolute authority over judicial appointments.
Although the Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had told Parliament in 2017 that his ministry had written to the CJI to take voluntary measures to increase the representation of judges from all sections, the government has, however, not supported the demands for reservations for SCs, STs, other backward classes and minorities in higher judiciary.
Leadership roles in India's judiciary continue to be dominated by men from dominant castes, with only rare exceptions. The latest recommendations, arrived at in meetings on 22 and 27 May under the current Collegium, do nothing to disturb that pattern. For India's 300 million-plus SC and ST citizens, who together account for nearly a quarter of the country's population and whose constitutional rights are most frequently argued before the very court these judges will join, the five names announced represent, once again, a bench on which they will not see themselves reflected.