Early in its first term, the Modi government attempted a fundamental overhaul of how India appoints its judges, replacing the judiciary-led Collegium system with a commission that included the executive branch directly. This article explains what that reform proposed, why the Supreme Court struck it down, and why the debate it started has never fully gone away.
What the NJAC Was Designed to Do
The National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, passed alongside the 99th Constitutional Amendment in 2014, was designed to replace the judiciary-led Collegium system, covered in more depth in our companion article on its ongoing tensions, with a new commission structure that included the Chief Justice of India, two other senior Supreme Court judges, the Union Law Minister, and two eminent persons selected through a separate process, a composition specifically designed to give the executive branch direct, formal representation in judicial appointments for the first time since the Collegium system had established judicial primacy over the process decades earlier.
The Government’s Rationale
The government’s stated justification for the reform centred on concerns about the Collegium system’s lack of transparency and accountability, arguing that a purely judiciary-led appointment process, with judges effectively selecting their own successors and colleagues without any formal executive or independent input, lacked the kind of external checks a matter as significant as judicial appointments warranted, a critique that found support among various legal commentators who had separately raised concerns about the Collegium’s opaque internal deliberations over the preceding years.
Also read: Judicial Appointments Under Modi: The Collegium System Tensions
The Supreme Court’s October 2015 Verdict
The NJAC’s life as operational law was remarkably short. In October 2015, a five-judge Supreme Court bench struck down both the NJAC Act and the accompanying 99th Constitutional Amendment by a 4-1 majority, according to the Supreme Court Observer’s detailed explainer on the ruling, finding that the reform violated judicial independence, a principle the court held forms part of the Constitution’s “basic structure,” a category of core constitutional principles that, under long-established Indian constitutional doctrine, cannot be altered even through a formal constitutional amendment passed by Parliament, making this one of the relatively rare instances where the Supreme Court has struck down a constitutional amendment itself rather than merely an ordinary law.
The Government’s Reaction
The verdict represented a significant, high-profile defeat for a reform the government had pursued with considerable political capital, having passed both the enabling law and the constitutional amendment through Parliament with substantial support before the court’s intervention. Government figures characterised the ruling at the time and in years since as, in the words later echoed by Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar, a disregard of a democratically enacted “people’s mandate,” according to The Wire’s coverage of his repeated public criticism of the Collegium system and advocacy for revisiting NJAC-style reform, with Dhankhar making this case publicly on multiple occasions, including twice within a single four-day period according to the same report, reflecting continued high-level government discomfort with the ruling even a decade later.
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Why the Government Hasn’t Formally Revived the Proposal
Despite this sustained rhetorical criticism, the government has stopped short of formally reintroducing NJAC-style legislation. Then-Law Minister Kiren Rijiju specifically told the Rajya Sabha there was “no proposal to reintroduce NJAC at present,” according to Outlook India’s coverage of his 2023 statement, even while continuing to voice broader criticism of Collegium opacity through other channels, a position that has left the underlying tension between the executive’s stated preference for a different appointment model and the judiciary’s constitutionally protected primacy over the process formally unresolved rather than actively re-litigated through new legislation.
The 2025 Renewed Debate
The Justice Yashwant Varma cash-discovery controversy, covered in more detail in our companion article on Collegium tensions, specifically reignited public discussion of NJAC-style reform in 2025, with commentary from outlets including The Print explicitly connecting the individual scandal to the broader, decade-old question of whether the Collegium’s internal, judiciary-only accountability mechanisms are genuinely sufficient, illustrating how a single high-profile controversy can, even a decade after the original NJAC verdict, quickly revive a structural debate that had otherwise remained largely dormant at the legislative level.
Bottom Line
The Modi government’s 2014 attempt to replace the Collegium system with the National Judicial Appointments Commission, giving the executive direct formal representation in judicial appointments, was struck down by the Supreme Court in October 2015 on a 4-1 vote for violating judicial independence as part of the Constitution’s basic structure, a defeat the government has continued criticising rhetorically through figures including Vice President Dhankhar without formally reintroducing the proposal, even as individual controversies like the 2025 Justice Varma cash row have continued periodically reviving the underlying debate over whether the current Collegium system provides adequate accountability.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available Supreme Court judgments and news reports listed below. It is written for general informational purposes and does not represent an official statement from the Government of India or the Supreme Court of India.
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