Our Judiciary Keeps Choosing its Own Reflection

William Shakespeare wrote “What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” Far from the realities of the Indian social milieu, Shakespeare envisioned the erasure of the name. However, the working of the Supreme Court defies Shakespeare's notion and appears to say that it is all in the last name.

Recently, the Supreme Court Collegium, headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, recommended four judges as Chief Justices of different high courts: Justice V. Kameswar Rao (Delhi high court) to Patna, Justice Ravindra V. Ghuge (Bombay) to Calcutta, Justice Mahesh Chandra Tripathi (Allahabad) to Bombay, and Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra to continue leading Punjab and Haryana. The pattern their names evoke is one of the most highly documented features of India’s higher judiciary, placed on record repeatedly by the government itself and by independent legal researchers.

In February this year, the Union law ministry told the Rajya Sabha that of 593 high court judges appointed between January 2021 and January 2026, barely 4% belonged to communities of the Scheduled Castes, about 2% to those of the Scheduled Tribes, under 14% to the Other Backward Classes (a category estimated at 40 to 50% of the population), and nearly 80% from the forward or 'upper' caste communities. This is not a one-off finding either. Government data for 715 judges appointed since 2018 showed an almost identical split with 77% general category, 3% SC, and 2% ST judges. At the Supreme Court, independent tracking by legal researchers found that after the 2023 round of appointments, at least 12 of the 33 sitting judges (about 36%) came from Brahmin communities alone, a group that makes for less than 5% of India’s population. Historian George Gadbois’ study of the court’s first four decades found Brahmins, then roughly 1/19th of the population, held over a third of all Supreme Court judgeships between 1950 and 1989.

Articles 124 and 217 of the constitution of India create no caste reservation for judges, and the collegium answers to no quota. This created a design flaw by creating a system where appointment runs through a closed, self-selecting circuit with sitting judges recommending candidates drawn from a narrow band of feeder pools: a handful of law schools, established legal families, and bars where dominant castes hold advantages built up over generations of literacy and access. 

The Memorandum of Procedure since 2018 asks only for “due consideration” to SC, ST, OBC, minority and women candidates. This is an aspiration with no defined criteria, no published data trail, and most importantly, no consequence for being ignored. Eight years of “due consideration” have produced almost the same caste profile the parliamentary panel's own data calls a “diversity deficit.”

Also read: Supreme Court Releases Landmark Report on How Constitutional Benches Have Addressed Caste

The insistence for diversity in these institutions is not for symbolic housekeeping alone. Judges decide who counts as a credible complainant under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, how a khap-adjacent dispute or an inter-caste marriage case gets read, and how land, maintenance, and inheritance claims across caste lines are resolved. Omry Yoresh and Weijian Zou of the London School of Economics contended the levels in which judicial bias can creep in:

“Within the same court, between-judge variability in religious in-group bias is larger than across district variability. The second early career period is critical for bias formation. Exposure to Hindu-Muslim communal riots during judges' first five years significantly increases religious in-group bias throughout their careers. Exposure to highly biased colleagues significantly increases incumbent judges' own group bias, flowing from seniors to junior judges”.

A bench drawn overwhelmingly from one narrow social band brings, inevitably, a narrower default frame to such calls. This doesn’t imply that it would be through malice, but through the ordinary limits of lived experience. The case for representative institutions rests on exactly this logic everywhere else in public life; there is no reason the judiciary should be exempt from it.

The irony sharpens against the efforts online to remove caste-based reservation, which have picked up several million followers on social media since late July, much of it riding on momentum built by the youth-led protests over NEET-UG irregularities. The followers of this effort repeat familiar lines on "merit", as if it is opposed to representation. Yet the one wing of the state that is constitutionally exempt from reservation, that selects purely on the “merit” its own insiders certify, has produced arguably the most skewed caste outcome of any organ of the Indian state. If merit alone explains who becomes a judge, its statistical signature looks remarkably like caste.

The answer may not be reservation for judges as that would need a constitutional amendment nobody credible is proposing, and would raise its own separation-of-powers questions. It is transparency which involves a published, audited social-background register attached to every collegium resolution, released the same day names and postings are announced. Until then, each fresh list of elevations, this one included, will keep confirming what the record already shows: India’s judiciary keeps choosing its own reflection.

Himanshi Yadav is a lawyer-researcher based in New Delhi.

Rajesh Ranjan is a lawyer-researcher based in London. 

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