Justice behind closed doors: Judiciary must confront its own dirty secret

Senior Advocate Indira Jaising’s recent remarks — delivered at the 29th D.S. Borker Memorial Lecture on “My Vision of India: 2047 A.D.”, and reported by LiveLaw on September 1 — deserve to be read not as passing commentary but as an institutional indictment that India’s higher judiciary can no longer wave away.

Jaising is not a fringe voice given to sensationalism. She is the country’s first woman Additional Solicitor General, the first woman Senior Advocate at the Bombay High Court, and a lawyer who says she has represented “a lot of women judges” who came to her with complaints of sexual harassment by male colleagues — testimony, she said, that led her to write in her own book that sexual harassment is “the dirty secret of the judiciary of India. No one wants to talk about it.”

One account she recounted at the lecture is particularly damning. She described a woman judge she had represented telling her that when a High Court judge retires, women district judges are made to line up in sarees of the same colour and throw flowers as the male judges walk past into the dining room — a practice, Jaising said, of “the higher judiciary” itself.

That same judge, she said, was separately asked by a High Court judge to attend his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party and “dance on an item number”. She resisted, and lost her job as a result. Whether this is the same case as the widely reported 2014 Madhya Pradesh matter — in which an Additional District and Sessions Judge in Gwalior resigned after alleging harassment by her administrative judge — is not established on the public record. The details echo each other closely enough that, at minimum, they point to a recurring institutional pattern rather than an isolated incident.

Senior Advocate Dr S. Muralidhar, who addressed the same lecture, lent independent weight to the concern, speaking of “growing instances” of women judges facing sexual innuendo and harassment from senior male colleagues.

The uncomfortable truth is that this is not a new revelation. Versions of this warning have surfaced from Jaising and others across more than a decade. In 2014, she was among a group of lawyers and activists publicly demanding the impeachment of a High Court judge after an Additional District and Sessions Judge resigned, alleging that his advances had led to her transfer.

That specific allegation did not hold up under formal scrutiny — a Rajya Sabha-appointed inquiry committee cleared the judge in December 2017 — even as litigation over the judicial officer’s own reinstatement continued for years afterward on separate grounds.

In 2019, Jaising faced an FCRA-linked notice after publicly questioning the process by which the Supreme Court’s own in-house committee had cleared a sitting Chief Justice of India of a former employee’s harassment complaint. In 2023, she wrote to the then Chief Justice flagging sexist conduct faced by women lawyers. And now, in 2026, she has returned to the same theme at a memorial lecture.

Some of these individual allegations have been contested, and at least one was formally not upheld — a fact any fair account must state plainly. But taken together, what these episodes show is not the guilt or innocence of any one individual. It is that the judiciary still has no dedicated, independent mechanism through which a judicial officer can report harassment by a colleague, a decade after the gap was first flagged.

A structure built for silence, not redress

The reason this abuse persists is structural, not incidental. India’s judicial hierarchy places enormous, largely unchecked power over a subordinate judicial officer’s career in the hands of an “administrative judge” of the High Court — Annual Confidential Reports, postings, promotions, even continuation in service.

A woman judge who resists an advance from someone who effectively controls her future is not merely risking an uncomfortable encounter. She is risking her career. This is precisely the coercive imbalance that the Vishaka guidelines (1997) and the POSH Act (2013) were designed to dismantle in every other Indian workplace. The judiciary that authored Vishaka has never fully turned that shield upon itself.

There is a bitter irony worth dwelling on. Judges routinely lecture other institutions on due process, natural justice, and the dignity of the workplace. Many of the finest judgments on gender justice in Indian constitutional law — from Vishaka to the more recent handbook on gender stereotyping issued during Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s tenure as Chief Justice — have emerged from this very institution.

That the same judiciary should lack a functioning, independent, and confidential mechanism through which a woman judge can report harassment by a colleague without fear of professional retaliation is not a minor administrative gap. It is a credibility gap.

In-house is not enough

Part of the problem lies in the judiciary’s reflexive preference for “in-house” resolution of complaints against judges — a mechanism built for allegations of judicial misconduct, not for something as personal and power-laden as harassment. Run by sitting judges assessing their own colleagues and superiors, it structurally discourages a complainant from coming forward, offering no independent investigation and no confidentiality proportionate to the risk she runs.

Contrast this with the Internal Complaints Committee framework the POSH Act mandates for every other Indian workplace — a framework the judiciary has upheld through its own judgments, even as it has been slow to build an equivalent standard for its own officers.

To be balanced, one must acknowledge the genuine difficulty here. Judicial independence cannot be casually diluted; allegations against judges cannot be handled exactly like ordinary employment complaints, given the risk of misuse to influence adjudication or appointments.

Any mechanism must be calibrated — independent enough to inspire confidence, insulated enough to prevent abuse. That is a real design challenge, not an excuse for inertia. The United States federal judiciary’s reforms after the Kozinski resignation show that credible, judge-led but externally audited mechanisms are possible without compromising independence.

What should follow

Three steps would signal that the judiciary is finally listening. First, the Supreme Court and every High Court should institute a dedicated, confidential, and functionally independent committee — distinct from the general in-house procedure — specifically to handle harassment complaints from judicial officers, with a majority of members drawn from outside the immediate administrative hierarchy of the accused.

Second, the practice of concentrating disproportionate administrative control over subordinate judges’ careers in a single individual needs review. Diffusing this power across a panel reduces the coercive leverage that makes silence the safer option.

Third, and perhaps most important, the judiciary must stop treating every disclosure of this kind as an attack on its dignity rather than an opportunity to protect it. Institutions that suppress uncomfortable truths do not preserve their credibility — they slowly forfeit it.

Indira Jaising has done the judiciary an uncomfortable favour by saying, on the record, what many within the system already know in whispers. The appropriate response is not defensiveness but reform — quiet, structural, and overdue.

A judiciary that asks citizens to trust it with their liberty and their rights cannot itself remain a place where women judges must weigh career survival against personal dignity. That reckoning cannot wait for the next resignation, the next whispered case, or the next public lecture to force the conversation again.

(The writer is with the Cholleti BlackRobe Chambers, Hyderabad, and writes on economy, politics and law.)

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