Menaka Guruswamy on Supreme Court Amendment Bill: “You Appoint Judges Based On Your Ideology”
There are moments in the life of a Parliament when a single sentence from the well of the House does more work than an entire day’s debate. That is precisely what happened this week when Dr. Menaka Guruswamy, Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court of India and newly elected Rajya Sabha member from West Bengal, rose to speak on the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026.
In under three minutes — repeatedly interrupted, partially expunged from the record, and eventually cut short by the Chair — she distilled a critique that practising lawyers have voiced in corridors and conferences for years but rarely heard spoken so plainly on the floor of Parliament: that the real crisis of the Indian judiciary is not the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court, but who gets to sit on its Bench.
As a lawyer who has spent the better part of a quarter-century inside courtrooms, watching the composition of Benches change and the collegium’s resolutions come and go, I want to use this piece to unpack what Dr. Guruswamy actually said, why the numbers she cited matter, and what the Bill she was debating does and does not achieve.
Supreme Court (Number Of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026: An Overview
The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026 amends Section 2 of the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956, to raise the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court.
Depending on which account one relies upon, the increase takes the sanctioned strength from either 33 or 34 judges to 37 or 38, excluding the Chief Justice of India — effectively four additional seats on the Bench.
The Bill had already cleared the Lok Sabha without discussion and was taken up for debate in the Rajya Sabha, where the government’s stated justification was the familiar one: reducing the mounting backlog of pending cases, which by some estimates runs into the tens of lakhs across the country.
Key Features Of The Bill
| Particular | Details |
|---|---|
| Legislation | Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026 |
| Amends | Section 2 of the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956 |
| Objective | Increase the sanctioned strength of Supreme Court judges. |
| Proposed Increase | Approximately four additional judges (excluding the Chief Justice of India) |
| Government’s Justification | Reduce the backlog of pending cases. |
The Debate in the Rajya Sabha
It was in this debate — on the specific question of whether four additional judges would meaningfully dent that backlog — that Dr. Guruswamy chose to speak not merely as a legislator, but explicitly as a Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court, invoking her professional standing before she made her substantive point.
“I Speak With Some Experience”: A Lawyer-Turned-Legislator Addresses Her Own Profession
Dr Guruswamy opened by grounding her intervention in professional credibility rather than political rhetoric.
She told the House that the problems afflicting the judiciary would not be solved merely by adding four more judges to the Supreme Court through an amending bill.
Her core contention, repeated in various forms through her truncated speech, was that the government’s reluctance is not about numbers at all — it is about the kind of judges it is willing to appoint.
In her words, reproduced here only in the briefest permissible form, the Centre tends to
“Only appoint judges who you think have your idea.”
— a line that has since become the headline of nearly every report on the debate, precisely because it named, without euphemism, what many members of the Bar discuss only privately: the perception that ideological alignment, more than merit or diversity, has increasingly become a silent qualification for elevation to constitutional courts.
Key Takeaways
- The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026, proposes increasing the sanctioned strength of Supreme Court judges.
- The government’s stated objective is to reduce the backlog of pending cases.
- Dr Menaka Guruswamy argued that merely increasing the number of judges will not resolve the judiciary’s structural problems.
- Her principal concern was the process and philosophy behind judicial appointments rather than the number of judicial posts.
- Her remarks have reignited debate over judicial independence, appointments, and the future of constitutional courts in India.
The Numbers She Put On Record
What elevated Dr Guruswamy’s speech beyond rhetoric was that she came armed with data — the kind of data that any lawyer who has tracked judicial appointments over the last decade would recognise immediately.
The figures she cited, before parts of her speech were directed off the record, included the following:
Judicial Appointment and Representation Data Cited
| Category | Figure Cited |
|---|---|
| Vacancies across High Courts nationally | Approximately 30% |
| Women among all sitting High Court judges | Approximately 14% |
| Combined share of Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and women judges in the judiciary | Under 20% |
| Scheduled caste judges appointed, 2018–2026 | Approximately 3% |
| Scheduled Tribe judges appointed, 2018–2026 | Approximately 2% |
| OBC judges appointed, 2018–2026 | Approximately 12% |
Concerns Raised on Diversity in Constitutional Courts
She went further, telling the House that the Centre has, in her assessment, been reluctant to elevate women, persons from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, religious minorities, and — in a line that drew audible reaction in the House, given that Dr. Guruswamy herself is India’s first openly gay Member of Parliament and was among the lead counsel in the 2018 constitutional challenge that read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — openly gay persons, to constitutional courts.
Representation Statistics and the Larger Debate
Whether or not one agrees with every inference she drew, the underlying vacancy and representation statistics are not new to anyone who follows Department of Justice disclosures or Law Ministry responses in Parliament on judicial vacancies.
What was new was hearing them assembled, in real time, by a sitting Senior Advocate turned parliamentarian, and used to argue that expanding the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength is, at best, a partial and possibly misdirected remedy.
Key Statistics at a Glance
- High Court vacancies nationally stand at approximately 30%.
- Women constitute approximately 14% of all sitting High Court judges.
- The combined share of Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and women judges remains under 20%.
- Scheduled Caste judicial appointments between 2018 and 2026 were approximately 3%.
- Scheduled Tribe judicial appointments between 2018 and 2026 were approximately 2%.
- OBC judicial appointments between 2018 and 2026 were approximately 12%.
Four Judges Versus Ninety-Five Thousand Cases: The Arithmetic Problem
Dr Guruswamy was not alone in raising this arithmetic concern. Congress MP and senior lawyer Vivek Tankha, who opened the debate, posed a pointed question to the Treasury Benches: with roughly 95,000 cases pending before the Supreme Court and lakhs more across the High Courts, is a four-judge increase — arrived at, in the first instance, by ordinance rather than through a full parliamentary debate — genuinely proportionate to the scale of the pendency crisis?
The government’s response, articulated by BJP MP Sangeeta Yadav, was that the increase forms part of a broader commitment to addressing the roughly 64 lakh cases pending in courts nationwide.
Competing Perspectives on Judicial Pendency
Both propositions can be true at once, and that is precisely the tension Dr Guruswamy’s speech exposed.
Increasing sanctioned strength is a necessary but wholly insufficient response if the appointment pipeline that fills those seats continues to draw from an unrepresentative pool.
Four additional Supreme Court judges do nothing to address the 30 percent vacancy rate in the High Courts, which is where the overwhelming majority of India’s litigants actually encounter the justice system, and where the feeder pool for future Supreme Court elevations is formed.
Key Figures Highlighted in the Debate
| Issue | Figure / Detail |
|---|---|
| Pending Supreme Court cases | Approximately 95,000 |
| Pending cases nationwide | Approximately 64 lakh |
| Increase in Supreme Court judges proposed | 4 Judges |
| High Court vacancy rate | Approximately 30% |
Core Issues Raised
- Whether an increase of four Supreme Court judges is proportionate to the scale of judicial pendency.
- The impact of nearly 95,000 pending Supreme Court cases.
- The government’s broader strategy to address approximately 64 lakh pending cases nationwide.
- The continuing 30 per cent vacancy rate in the High Courts.
- The importance of strengthening the judicial appointment pipeline for long-term reform.
The Constitutional Backdrop: Collegium, Appointments, and Institutional Memory
No commentary on judicial appointments in India is complete without situating it against the collegium system, which has governed elevation to the higher judiciary since the Supreme Court’s own pronouncements reshaped Article 124 and Article 217 of the Constitution.
In Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India, (2016) 5 SCC 1, a Constitution Bench struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act and the accompanying constitutional amendment, holding that primacy in judicial appointments must rest with the judiciary itself in order to preserve independence from the executive. That judgement remains the operative framework today.
Executive Role After Collegium Recommendations
What Dr. Guruswamy’s speech implicitly raises is a harder, second-order question that the 2016 judgment does not resolve: even where the judiciary retains primacy in recommending names, the executive retains a functional veto through delay, return, and reconsideration of collegium recommendations.
It is at that stage — the interface between judicial recommendation and executive concurrence — that questions of ideological screening, whether real or perceived, tend to arise.
Successive Law Commission reports and parliamentary standing committee observations have flagged the same structural gap: a recommendation once returned by the government can sit in abeyance for months, and reiterated names are not always processed with the promptness the collegium’s own resolutions have said they should be.
Article 370: Judgement and Constitutional Commitments
Dr. Guruswamy also invoked, later in the same sitting, the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Article 370 matter, In Re: Article 370 of the Constitution, 2023 INSC 1058, pointing out that the Union’s assurance to the Court regarding restoration of statehood to Jammu and Kashmir remains, in her submission, unfulfilled nearly two years on.
While that observation was made in a separate intervention rather than strictly within the Judges Amendment Bill debate, it reflects a consistent thread in her parliamentary interventions: that constitutional commitments recorded before the Supreme Court ought to bind the executive in substance and not merely in form.
Key Constitutional Issues Highlighted
| Issue | Exact Point Raised |
|---|---|
| Judicial Appointments | The judiciary retains primacy, but the executive continues to exercise influence through delay, return, and reconsideration of collegium recommendations. |
| Ideological Screening | Questions may arise at the stage between judicial recommendation and executive concurrence. |
| Pending Recommendations | Returned recommendations may remain pending for months despite collegium reiteration. |
| Article 370 | The union’s assurance regarding the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir statehood remains, according to Dr Guruswamy, unfulfilled. |
| Constitutional Accountability | Commitments made before the Supreme Court should bind the executive in substance and not merely in form. |
Being Cut Off: The Politics Of What Goes “On Record”
A significant part of why this speech travelled as widely as it did is procedural rather than substantive.
Several portions of Dr. Guruswamy’s remarks — particularly her characterisation of the government’s approach to appointments — were directed by the Chair to be expunged or kept off the official record, even as she continued speaking.
She later raised this as a separate grievance in the House, alleging that microphones are switched off when the Opposition raises matters the Treasury Benches find uncomfortable, and describing Parliament, a people’s institution, as being reduced in stature by such practices.
Impact of Expunction on Parliamentary Debate
Whatever one’s view of the propriety of any individual remark, the expunction of a sitting Senior Advocate’s data-backed submission on judicial diversity — delivered during a debate specifically about the composition and strength of the Supreme Court — raises its own separate question about the space available in Parliament for informed professional critique of the judiciary’s appointment process, as distinct from partisan point-scoring.
Quick Summary
- The collegium system remains the governing framework for judicial appointments following the 2016 Constitution Bench judgement.
- Dr Guruswamy highlighted concerns regarding executive delay and reconsideration of collegium recommendations.
- She referred to the Supreme Court’s Article 370 judgement and the pending restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood.
- She argued that constitutional assurances made before the Supreme Court should be honoured in substance.
- Parts of her parliamentary speech were directed to be expunged, leading to concerns about the scope of informed parliamentary debate.
Why This Matters To The Practising Bar
For those of us who have practised before the Supreme Court and the High Courts for two and a half decades, the diversity figures Dr. Guruswamy cited will not come as a surprise, but hearing them read into the Rajya Sabha record by a Senior Advocate carries a different weight than hearing them discussed at a Bar Council seminar.
A few observations from that vantage point:
- Sanctioned strength versus working strength. Increasing the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength by ordinance and then by amending legislation is administratively simple compared to the far harder task of ensuring collegium recommendations for existing and future vacancies are processed without protracted executive delay.
- High Court vacancies as the real bottleneck. With nearly a third of High Court posts vacant nationally, litigants at the first and second appellate levels bear the brunt of pendency long before a matter could conceivably reach the Supreme Court. Four additional apex court judges do not touch this layer of the crisis at all.
- Representation as a merit question, not merely an optics question. A Bench that draws overwhelmingly from a narrow social and professional background inevitably develops blind spots in adjudicating matters that touch caste, gender, religion, and sexuality — precisely the categories of cases where lived experience sharpens judicial reasoning.
- Institutional transparency. The collegium’s own resolutions are not published as a matter of routine practice, and reasons for returning or delaying a recommended name are rarely placed in the public domain, making it difficult for anyone — including Parliament — to test claims of ideological screening against verifiable data.
Key Observations From A Practising Lawyer’s Perspective
| Issue | Practical Impact |
|---|---|
| Sanctioned Strength vs Working Strength | Increasing sanctioned judicial strength is comparatively easy, but timely processing of collegium recommendations remains the larger administrative challenge. |
| High Court Vacancies | Nearly one-third of High Court vacancies continue to contribute significantly to judicial pendency across the country. |
| Judicial Representation | A more diverse bench may strengthen judicial reasoning in cases involving caste, gender, religion, and sexuality. |
| Institutional Transparency | Limited disclosure regarding collegium decisions makes public scrutiny and accountability more difficult. |
The Broader Takeaway
The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026 will, in all likelihood, become law, and four more judges will, in time, take their oaths on the apex court’s Bench.
That much is close to a formality.
What Dr. Menaka Guruswamy’s intervention accomplished was to ensure that the debate around the Bill did not end there — that Parliament, however briefly and however imperfectly recorded, was made to confront the harder question of who those four judges, and the hundreds of judges appointed after them, will actually be, and whether the process that selects them is producing a judiciary that looks like the country it serves.
Why The Debate Goes Beyond Four New Judges
- The legislation is expected to increase the Supreme Court’s judicial strength.
- The larger constitutional debate concerns the process of judicial appointments.
- The discussion extends to representation, diversity, and transparency in the higher judiciary.
- The long-term impact will depend on the profile of future judicial appointments rather than merely the increase in sanctioned posts.
That is the real significance of her remark that the government tends to appoint judges “who have your idea” — not as an attack on any individual appointment, but as a challenge to examine, with data rather than assumption, whether India’s higher judiciary is becoming more representative or less so.
It is a question every practising lawyer, regardless of political persuasion, should want answered with facts on the table rather than left to speculation in bar-room conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- What did Dr. Menaka Guruswamy say about the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026? Dr. Menaka Guruswamy argued that merely increasing the number of Supreme Court judges under the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026 will not solve India’s judicial backlog. She contended that the larger issue lies in how judges are appointed, emphasising concerns over judicial diversity, representation, and the perceived influence of ideology in appointments.
- What changes does the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026, introduce? The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026 increases the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court by adding four more judges, with the government’s objective of reducing the growing backlog of pending cases. However, critics argue that filling existing judicial vacancies and reforming the appointment process are equally important for improving the justice delivery system.
- Why are High Court vacancies considered a bigger concern than adding more Supreme Court judges? According to the debate highlighted in the article, nearly 30% of High Court posts remain vacant, causing significant delays for litigants across India. Since High Courts handle the majority of appeals and also serve as the primary source for future Supreme Court judges, addressing High Court vacancies is viewed as more critical than simply expanding the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength. Issue Why It Matters High Court vacancies Nearly 30% of posts remain vacant, contributing to delays in justice delivery. Role of High Courts High Courts hear the majority of appeals and are the primary source of future Supreme Court judges. Judicial reform addressing vacancies is considered more significant than merely increasing the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength.
- How does the collegium system influence Supreme Court and High Court judicial appointments? Under India’s collegium system, the judiciary recommends appointments to the higher courts, while the executive plays a role in processing those recommendations. The article discusses concerns that delays or reconsideration of collegium recommendations may affect judicial independence and fuel debates over transparency, diversity, and ideological influence in judicial appointments. Key Points
- The judiciary recommends appointments to higher courts.
- The executive processes the recommendations.
- Delays or reconsideration may raise concerns regarding judicial independence.
- The system continues to generate debate over transparency, diversity, and ideological influence.
- Why is judicial diversity important in the Indian judiciary? Judicial diversity is considered essential because a bench representing different social backgrounds, genders, communities, and experiences can strengthen public confidence and enrich constitutional decision-making. Dr. Menaka Guruswamy argued that increasing representation of women, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs, minorities, and other underrepresented groups is crucial for building a judiciary that reflects the society it serves. Importance of Judicial Diversity
- Strengthens public confidence in the judiciary.
- Enriches constitutional decision-making.
- Promotes representation of diverse social backgrounds.
- Encourages inclusion of women, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs, minorities, and other under-represented groups.
- Helps build a judiciary that reflects the society it serves.
Key Takeaways
The following are the key takeaways from the discussion on the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026:
- The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026, increases the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court by four judges, aiming to reduce the growing backlog of pending cases.
- Dr. Menaka Guruswamy argued in the Rajya Sabha that simply adding more Supreme Court judges will not solve India’s judicial crisis unless the judicial appointments process is also reformed.
- The central issue highlighted in the debate is judicial appointments, with concerns that ideology, rather than merit and diversity, may influence who is elevated to constitutional courts.
- The article highlights significant representation gaps in the higher judiciary, noting low percentages of women, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and OBC judges in recent appointments.
- Nearly 30% of High Court posts remain vacant, suggesting that filling existing vacancies may have a greater impact on reducing case pendency than merely expanding the Supreme Court’s strength.
- The debate underscores that judicial diversity is essential for strengthening public confidence, constitutional adjudication, and equal access to justice.
- The article revisits the collegium system and examines the continuing debate over executive delays, transparency, and accountability in judicial appointments after the NJAC judgement.
- It argues that increasing the working strength of courts requires not only new sanctioned posts but also timely appointments and greater transparency in processing collegium recommendations.
- The discussion emphasizes that High Court vacancies are the real bottleneck in India’s justice delivery system because most litigants never reach the Supreme Court.
- The article concludes that the lasting significance of the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026 lies not in adding four judges, but in reigniting the national conversation on judicial independence, diversity, transparency, and the future of judicial appointments in India.
Quick Summary Table
| Issue | Key Point |
|---|---|
| Supreme Court Strength | Bill proposes adding four judges to reduce case backlog. |
| Judicial Appointments | Reforms in appointments are considered equally important. |
| Judicial Diversity | Representation of women, SCs, STs and OBCs remains low. |
| High Court Vacancies | Nearly 30% of posts remain vacant, affecting justice delivery. |
| Transparency | Debate continues over collegium recommendations and executive delays. |
| Long-Term Significance | The Bill has revived the national debate on judicial independence, diversity and accountability. |
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