On 20 August 2026, the Department of Justice notified nine advocates who will take the oath as Additional Judges of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. On 4 May, the Supreme Court Collegium had approved ten, on a list that began in the High Court collegium and carried the endorsement of every constitutional functionary consulted along the way. The nine who have taken oath deserve every good wish, and nothing here reflects on them. The tenth name, that of Major Navdeep Singh, Senior Advocate, has been dropped without a word. I write this not as an academic observer of the appointments process but as a practising advocate who has watched, at close range, how lawyers quietly alter their professional choices in response to what that process rewards and punishes.

Three distinct arguments run through this piece, and it is best to state them at the outset. The first is procedural: a candidate cleared through the constitutional selection process should not disappear into unexplained executive silence. The second is constitutional: even without reservation, which nobody is demanding, the composition of the judiciary is not a matter to which a constitutional democracy can be indifferent. The third is institutional: the opacity of the present process makes it impossible to distinguish legitimate selection from arbitrary exclusion, and that inability is itself the injury. Put shortly, the question is not whether Navdeep Singh is entitled to a judgeship because he is a Sikh. It is whether a candidate who has cleared the constitutional selection process can be silently excluded without explanation, and whether a judiciary that already suffers from a demonstrable diversity deficit can afford to treat representation as irrelevant.

The Man And The Silence

Navdeep Singh's record is public. A constitutional and service law practitioner at Chandigarh, he is the most decorated officer in the history of the Territorial Army, with eleven commendations earned largely while serving in counter insurgency areas during court vacations. He founded the Armed Forces Tribunal Bar Association, served on the Government's own Committee of Experts constituted in 2015 under the late Manohar Parrikar to curb litigation against soldiers, helped shape international military justice instruments at Yale and Stellenbosch, and has written or edited several books and over two hundred articles. He was the only military veteran among the ten recommended, and the only turbaned Sikh.

I do not claim to know why he was excluded. That is precisely the point. No reason has been recorded, disclosed or even hinted at, to him, to the Collegium or to the public. What I am asking is why the country is not entitled to know.

This Has Happened Before

The silence is harder to accept because it is not new. In October 2023, the Collegium recommended five advocates for this very court; the Centre appointed three and withheld the two turbaned Sikhs in the batch, Harmeet Singh Grewal and Deepinder Singh Nalwa. A bench headed by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul asked in open court: "Two of the candidates not cleared are both Sikhs. Why should this arise?" The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee called it discrimination. No answer ever came. The two were appointed only in February 2025, nearly sixteen months after they were first cleared, their seniority permanently damaged.

Nor is unexplained withholding reserved for any one community. Senior Advocate Aditya Sondhi withdrew his consent to a Karnataka High Court judgeship in 2022 after a year of silence while his batchmates were appointed. Shwetasree Majumdar, one of the country's finest intellectual property lawyers, withdrew in 2025 after the Government appointed the two advocates recommended alongside her and never acted on her file. In no case was a reason stated. A lawyer who consents to judgeship winds down a practice built over decades; to leave such a person in limbo indefinitely is a quiet cruelty, and the Bench loses its best candidates to it.

The Numbers Tell A Larger Story

Set these episodes against the composition of the courts, with one honest caveat: the Government does not formally record the religion of judges, so counts of community rest on publicly known identity. By my count from the public record, of the roughly fifty five judges serving in the Punjab and Haryana High Court on the eve of these appointments, eleven are Sikhs, in a court whose jurisdiction includes the one Indian state where Sikhs are a majority, and only five of those eleven came from the Bar; the rest rose from the judicial services, as a matter of right, as per their seniority, at the close of long careers, with little time left to shape the court's jurisprudence. Representation that arrives late and leaves early is representation in name.

Higher up, the Supreme Court has had no Sikh judge since Chief Justice J.S. Khehar retired in August 2017. Justice Gurmeet Singh Sandhawalia, Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court, is by all India seniority the third senior most High Court judge in the country and the senior most sitting Sikh Chief Justice, with an unblemished record; lawyers of the region, concerned by he being marginalised , have formally petitioned for his elevation. Yet when the Collegium recommended five appointments to the Supreme Court this May, he was passed over, and among those elevated was a judge junior to him from his own parent High Court.

The picture is no better elsewhere. The Department of Justice's list of judges as on 1 February 2026 shows the Delhi High Court, in the capital of a country of, with a sizable Muslim population, with forty four judges serving against a sanctioned strength of sixty and not one publicly identifiable Muslim among them. So far as community is publicly known, the Supreme Court today has one Muslim judge and one Christian judge against a sanctioned strength of thirty eight now. And the caste picture comes from the Government's own mouth: in March 2025 the Law Ministry informed the Rajya Sabha that of 715 High Court judges appointed since 2018, only 22 were from the Scheduled Castes, 16 from the Scheduled Tribes, 89 from the Other Backward Classes and 37 from the minorities, which leaves roughly seventy seven per cent drawn from the upper castes, and, as anyone who practises in our constitutional courts knows, disproportionately from a narrow, urban, English speaking elite, from established legal families and a handful of storied chambers, a phenomenon entrenched enough that the Law Commission's 230th Report and Parliament's own records discuss it as the "uncle judges" syndrome. In seventy six years, only two Dalits have held the office of Chief Justice of India. Whole states can go unseen too: Jharkhand waited a decade for a judge of its High Court to sit on the Supreme Court, until this year's round of appointments. Parliament's Standing Committee on Law and Justice, in its 133rd Report of August 2023, called this a "diversity deficit", recorded a declining trend, and recommended that the collegiums recommend adequate numbers from the marginalised sections, a duty it wanted written into the Memorandum of Procedure. Nothing of the kind has happened. We cannot even measure the pipeline, because no body, governmental or professional, publishes data on the social composition of the lakhs of lawyers who enrol each year.

This Is Not An Argument For Quotas

There is no reservation in the higher judiciary, and no one is asking for any. But the absence of a quota is not the absence of a constitutional concern. Four ideas must be kept apart: reservation, which is a legally prescribed allocation; representation, which asks whether an institution broadly reflects the society it governs; merit, which is the threshold of competence every candidate must cross; and selection, which is the choice among the many who cross it. The argument here is not that anyone should be appointed because of community. It is that when several candidates are professionally qualified, the institutions choosing among them cannot be indifferent to a pattern in which entire sections of society are systematically absent from the outcome.

And this matters for justice itself, not merely for appearances, because judging is not a mechanical act. Every judge who takes the oath applies open textured phrases, equality, due process, dignity, reasonableness, to the facts of other people's lives, and what strikes a judge as reasonable or fair depends, inescapably, on the range of lives that judge is able to imagine. The judicial power of a constitutional court is an exercise of constitutional morality and of equity as much as of technical law; between two legally available outcomes, it is a judge's tempered sense of what justice requires that decides the case, and that sense is formed by experience. In a country of this size and diversity, where the same statute falls upon a tribal forest dweller, an urban startup founder and a landless labourer, a bench drawn from a single narrow stratum will, with the best will in the world, see some litigants clearly and others only dimly. Diversity on the Bench is therefore not a concession to identity politics; it is an epistemic necessity for a fairer and more equitable system of justice, one in which litigants of every description can be understood, and can believe they will be understood. South Africa's framers went further and constitutionalised the concern: Section 174(2) of that country's Constitution directs that "the need for the judiciary to reflect broadly the racial and gender composition of South Africa must be considered when judicial officers are appointed." India chose a different model, leaving composition to the discretion of the appointing institutions under Articles 124 and 217. But a discretion left unstructured by text is structured by constitutional morality, and the equality code of our Constitution is not suspended at the door of the appointments process. Where there is no quota, diversity can come only from conscious choice. That is a duty, not a favour.

What If There Is A Reason?

The fair minded reader will ask the obvious question: perhaps there is something about this candidature the public does not know. I accept that possibility without reservation. There may be considerations of suitability known to the Government and not to us; I do not claim otherwise. But the Constitution's own machinery answers this. The Memorandum of Procedure permits the Government to return a recommendation, with reasons, for the Collegium's reconsideration, and the Collegium can then weigh the material and respond. What the Government has done instead is neither to appoint nor to return, but to sit silent while notifying everyone else. If there is a reason, the process exists to state it. If there is none, the appointment must issue. A constitutional system should not operate through unexplained exclusion, because unexplained exclusion is indistinguishable, from the outside, from arbitrary or discriminatory exclusion, and the reputational cost of that ambiguity is borne by the candidate and by the institution, never by the officials who maintain the silence.

Why The Stakes Are So High

These are not ordinary personnel decisions. Whatever the merits of individual candidates, appointments to the constitutional courts are exercises of public power with profound and near permanent consequences. Not a single judge of a High Court or the Supreme Court has been removed through the constitutional process in the seventy nine years since Independence. A judge once appointed will interpret the Constitution and decide questions of life, liberty and property for decades, answerable in that time to conscience alone. And each such judge carries an extraordinary share of the Republic. The Punjab and Haryana High Court serves upward of six crore people through a working bench in the sixties, roughly one judge for every ten lakh citizens; nationally, the Department of Justice's court wise statement as on 1 May 2026 records 797 working judges against a sanctioned 1,122, nearly one in three seats vacant. In a system this stretched, every name added or withheld matters enormously, and every unexplained withholding is a decision of constitutional consequence taken invisibly.

The Lawyer Watching From The Back Of The Court

Think, finally, of what all this teaches the young lawyer watching. A first generation lawyer, a Dalit or Adivasi lawyer, a Muslim or Sikh lawyer, a woman without a judge for a father, a scholar, an independent mind: each learns, episode by episode, that the system will not reliably reward merit, integrity, scholarship, courage or the diversity they embody, and that it may answer those qualities with silence and limbo. Many of the best will simply stop thinking of judgeship at all. I confess I am one of them. That loss appears in no government table, but the institution will pay it for a generation.

So, who gets to judge in India? Today the honest answer is: whoever survives a process in which the Collegium chooses behind closed doors and the Government vetoes behind closed lips. Neither should be able to decide invisibly. If there is material against Major Navdeep Singh, let it be returned to the Collegium with reasons, as the process commands. If there is none, let the warrant issue. And in either event, let both institutions begin doing openly what the Constitution's promise of equality demands: seeking out able candidates from every section of this country, appointing them, and telling us why when they do not. Until then, every list of ten that arrives as a list of nine will ask a question the system refuses to answer, and the silence will go on doing its quiet damage. The independence of opinion, commitment to principles of preamble to constitution should never be a disqualification to become a judge in India, a constitutional democracy.

Author is an Advocate practicing at Punjab and Haryana High Court. Views are personal.