The Grievance Mechanism the Constitution Never Built

The Silence Between "Master of the Roster" and a Judge's Grievance Article 223

gives the President the power to name an Acting Chief Justice of a High Court when the office falls vacant. What the Constitution does not give is anywhere for one sitting judge to formally lodge a grievance against another judge's conduct in that role - no tribunal, no timeline, no defined process.

That silence is the actual reason this dispute reached the public through three unanswered letters instead of through any institutional channel.

The Text Says, the Practice Shows

The text of Article 223 is entirely about appointment; it says nothing about oversight once someone is appointed. In practice, the "Master of the Roster" doctrine - the Chief Justice's exclusive power to allocate cases and constitute benches, affirmed by the Supreme Court itself in Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms v. Union of India (2017)

• sits almost entirely outside external review. When Justice Mehta alleged that cases were being "withdrawn from other rosters" and shifted without justification, he was alleging exactly the kind of discretionary misuse that doctrine makes structurally difficult to challenge from outside the institution. His only route was informal: letters to the CJI, copied to Collegium members and finally, three weeks of silence later, publicity.

Why the CJI's Response Confirms the Gap The

CJI's own statement - that "the Supreme Court cannot allow individual complaints concerning judges to be determined through competing claims in the media"

• is correct as a principle. But it also implicitly concedes there is no formal alternative: no defined body, no published timeline, no procedural rulebook for exactly this situation, a sitting SC judge accusing a High Court Acting CJ of institutional misconduct. The 2018 SC press conference by four senior judges over the previous CJI's roster allocations was the last time this exact structural gap surfaced publicly and eight years on, nothing has been formally built to close it - only the informal expectation that such complaints stay inside the institution, however long that takes. This is precisely why the timing matters for the exam more than the allegations themselves: Justice Sharma's candidature for permanent CJ was reportedly "actively being considered" by the same Collegium his accuser sits adjacent to. A dispute this significant, resolved entirely through informal consultation with no visible process, is not a one-off personality clash - it is what happens whenever a constitutional silence meets a genuine institutional grievance with nowhere formal to go.