Judicial selection process under lens as SC grapples with garbled verdicts

last month, the Uttarakhand High Court directed the State Election Commissioner and the Chief Secretary to review whether an Additional District Magistrate, who admitted he could understand English but not speak it, was fit to serve as an election registration officer.

This controversial order was later stayed by the Supreme Court, which has itself repeatedly expressed concern over “utterly incomprehensible” high court judgments that defy basic rules of English grammar and show little “application of the judicial mind to the factual and legal controversies involved”.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court sent a criminal appeal back to the Punjab and Haryana High Court after being unable to decipher the judgment under challenge. A Bench led by Chief Justice BR Gavai noted, "We have also carefully perused the impugned judgments and orders. In spite of our strenuous efforts, we could not understand the reasoning given in the impugned judgments and orders."

This is not an isolated incident. In 2017, the Supreme Court set aside a verdict from the Himachal Pradesh High Court in a tenant-landlord dispute because the language was so poor that the ruling was impossible to understand. That same year, the top court remanded another case to the Rajasthan High Court after finding that the judgment contained neither the facts of the case nor the reasons for the conclusions reached. The court was surprised to see that the submissions of the parties were not recorded, nor were the legal issues examined in light of relevant statutes.

In 2022, the Supreme Court even commented on a 2017 Himachal Pradesh High Court verdict by asking, "Is this in Latin? We may have to send it back to the high court for it to be re-written." Once again, the Supreme Court was forced to set aside another "utterly incomprehensible" ruling from the same court and return it for fresh adjudication.

Article 348(1)(a) of the Constitution of India mandates that all proceedings in the Supreme Court and every high court shall be conducted in English. Poorly reasoned judgments, written in incoherent English and lacking judicial application of mind, reveal alarming incompetence within the judiciary. Such judgments are not merely unprofessional, these are fatal to justice. This recurring problem raises serious questions over the selection of judges through a process which largely remains opaque.

Recently, the Supreme Court Collegium has introduced personal interviews for candidates before recommending their appointment as high court judges. This is a welcome step. While the debate over replacing the Collegium system continues, there is an urgent need to establish a secretariat to assist the Collegium, a reform proposed in 2015 by the Constitution Bench that struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC). The sooner this is done, the better.