When Secrecy Would Be Struck Down Anywhere Else

The Institution That Polices Everyone Else's Secrecy Has Stopped Explaining Its Own Here is the

fact worth sitting with: in October 2017, India's Supreme Court Collegium voluntarily began publishing reasons for its judicial appointment decisions. That was not forced on it - it was offered as a foundation for transparency.

Since November 2024, that same body has stopped naming even which of its members participated in a decision, let alone why. The Collegium did not fail to become more transparent over time. It became less transparent than it once chose to be.

The Standard It Applies Everywhere Else

This matters because the same Court has, in other contexts, taken a hard line against exactly this kind of opacity. In the 2023 MediaOne judgment, the Supreme Court held that relying on "sealed cover" submissions - evidence withheld from a party, seen only by the judge - is "antithetical to a transparent and accountable system." That is a serious, considered judicial position: secrecy in adjudication corrodes the legitimacy of the outcome, however well-intentioned.

The Collegium's own resolutions, offering no reasons and no record of who decided, are functionally the same kind of opacity applied to the single most consequential decision the judiciary makes about itself - who sits on the bench.

Why "Protecting Candidates" Doesn't Resolve the Tension

The stated reason for the retreat - that publishing reasons could harm the professional prospects of candidates not selected - is a real concern, not an invented one. But it is also, as legal commentators have noted, a rationale that would justify withholding reasons from every rejected litigant in every case the courts hear and no court applies that logic to its own judgments.

The Collegium's justification protects the institution and the candidates from scrutiny; it does not resolve why judicial appointments should be held to a lower disclosure standard than the sealed-cover practices the same judiciary has ruled against elsewhere.

What the "Uncle Judges" Allegation Actually Tests

The opacity is not an abstract governance concern - it has a concrete, alleged cost. In 2018, the Union government flagged 11 of 33 Allahabad High Court collegium recommendations as relatives of sitting or retired judges.

A 2025 assessment found roughly 30% of Supreme Court judges had familial links to former judges. Neither figure proves wrongdoing in any individual case. But without a published eligibility matrix or reasoning, there is no way to distinguish a meritorious relative from a beneficiary of lineage - which is precisely the kind of unaccountable, backdoor-adjacent process the Court itself struck down in the Karnataka v.

Umadevi case for ordinary public employment. For the exam, the mechanism worth carrying is this: an institution's credibility on transparency is tested not by what it says about other institutions, but by whether it applies the same standard to itself - and a body that strikes down sealed-cover secrecy in every other case while retreating into it for its own most consequential decisions has not yet passed that test.