New Delhi: Over three-quarters of high court judges appointed between 2018 and earlier this month are upper-caste, Union law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal said in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday (December 14).
Meghwal was answering a question by BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh Harnath Singh Yadav asking if there were caste-based reservations for the appointment of judges to high courts and the Supreme Court.
His response said that 492 out of 650 judges appointed to the country’s high courts between 2018 and December 6 were upper-caste (76%), 77 were OBCs (12%), 36 were minorities (6%), 20 were SCs (3%), 12 were STs (2%) and 13 judges were of unknown background.
The data was provided by the judges who had been recommended for appointment, Meghwal said.
He clarified that there were no caste-based reservations for the appointment of high court and Supreme Court judges, but reiterated his ministry’s stance that it has been requesting high court chief justices to give “due consideration” to candidates from marginalised backgrounds.
The numbers he provided on Thursday were slightly different from the ones he provided on December 7 while answering a question in the same House by Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP from Kerala, John Brittas.
In that response, Meghwal said that out of 650 judges appointed to the high courts between 2018 and December 2, 23 were SC (compared to the more recent figure of 20), ten were ST (as opposed to 12) and 76 were OBC (as opposed to 77).
Meghwal also provided information on the number of women judges in India’s top courts. According to his reply, three judges in the Supreme Court as of December 2 were women, as were 108 judges across all high courts.
Taking the total number of high court judges as per Meghwal’s latest response as 790, the proportion of women judges in India’s high courts stands at roughly 14%.
While trying to gain control over judicial appointments by doing away with the collegium system, the Union government has maintained that in the three decades since the system has been in place, it has failed to address the issue of ‘social diversity in the higher judiciary as originally devised by the Supreme Court’.
A parliamentary panel said in August this year that a provision to appoint adequate numbers of women, OBC, SC and ST candidates as judges “should be clearly mentioned in the Memoranda of Procedure, which is currently under finalisation,” The Hindu reported.
The panel added that the representation of these groups in the higher judiciary was “far below the desired levels and does not reflect the social diversity of the country”.
Judges are appointed to the high courts and the Supreme Court as per as the procedure laid down in the memorandum of procedure (MoP), Meghwal said.
His response to Brittas stated that the Supreme Court agreed in a draft MoP that while “merit and integrity” would primarily decide the appointment of high court judges, the representation of women and candidates from marginalised communities would be given “as far as possible”.
But the law minister said that while the Supreme Court had acknowledged the need to revisit the MoP and that the government has recommended improvements to it, “the views of the Supreme Court on draft MoP are awaited”.
In the past, the top court has pushed back on the criticism of the collegium system, admitting that though the system may not be perfect, it is the law of the land and must be followed.