Judicial Accountability in India: How Are Supreme Court and High Court Judges Removed?

Political and Constitutional Dimensions The framers deliberately vested the power to remove a judge in Parliament rather than in the executive or even in the judiciary's own hierarchy, to guard against both political vendettas and internal capture. The high threshold — a special majority in both Houses, preceded by a judicial fact-finding committee — was meant to make removal rare and reserved for genuinely proved misconduct. In practice, this threshold has made the formal route almost unusable: no judge of India's higher judiciary has ever been removed through Articles 124/217 read with the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. The informal in-house mechanism has, over time, become the de facto accountability tool, nudging judges toward resignation rather than producing formal, binding verdicts — a workaround that raises real separation-of-powers questions about whether accountability is happening through the Constitution's intended channel at all.

Economic and Financial Dimensions The originating trigger in this case — the discovery of currency notes — puts a spotlight on the absence of any mandatory, public, and independently verifiable asset-and-liability disclosure regime for higher-judiciary judges, unlike the disclosure norms that apply to many other public officials. There is also an efficiency dimension: the constitutional removal machinery under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 is elaborate and has never been successfully completed, while the cheaper, faster in-house mechanism carries no statutory teeth. Neither route currently combines speed, legitimacy, and finality in a cost-effective way.

Social Dimensions Public trust in the judiciary depends on visible, credible consequences for misconduct among its own members. When an inquiry ends in resignation rather than a published, reasoned finding, it can be read by the public either as an honourable exit or as an escape from scrutiny — and the confidentiality that traditionally surrounds in-house proceedings makes it hard for citizens, the media, and civil society to judge which interpretation is correct. This ambiguity feeds a broader social perception that constitutional functionaries, including judges, operate under a different standard of accountability than ordinary citizens or other public servants.

Governance and Administrative Dimensions Administratively, the in-house procedure's chief strength — flexibility and confidentiality — is also its chief weakness: it has no statutory backing, no binding power, no appellate check, and no codified timelines, and it offers the accused judge limited formal due-process guarantees compared to the statutory Judges (Inquiry) Act route. This has repeatedly prompted calls to codify judicial accountability through legislation — most notably the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill, introduced in 2010 and later lapsed — which sought to create a permanent oversight committee with defined procedures for both minor and serious judicial misconduct.

International Perspective Comparatively, most mature democracies also treat judicial removal as a high-threshold, legislature-led process rather than an executive one. In the United Kingdom, the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office handles complaints against judges through a structured statutory framework with graded sanctions short of removal. In the United States, federal judges are removed only through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate — a process almost as rare as India's, underscoring that the tension between judicial independence and judicial accountability is a shared, not uniquely Indian, constitutional challenge, and one on which comparative examples frequently appear in examination answers.