Removal of Judges in India: A Complete Guide for UPSC Aspirants
Introduction
Judicial independence is one of the cornerstones of India's constitutional democracy, and it rests on a delicate balance: judges must be free enough to decide cases without fear, yet accountable enough that misconduct does not go unchecked. The constitutional mechanism for removing a judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court — commonly, though loosely, called "impeachment" — sits precisely at this intersection of independence and accountability.
For UPSC aspirants, this topic is a recurring favourite across Prelims (Polity) and Mains (GS-II, Essay) because it combines constitutional provisions, statutory procedure, landmark cases, and contemporary relevance. The 2025–26 controversy involving Justice Yashwant Varma of the Allahabad High Court — where sacks of unaccounted cash were allegedly found at his residence — has brought the process back into national conversation and made it even more important from an examination standpoint. This blog breaks down everything an aspirant needs to know: the constitutional framework, the statutory procedure, historical precedents, the ongoing case, and the debates around reform.
Why Judges Need Security of Tenure
Before understanding removal, it helps to understand why the framers made it so difficult in the first place. Unlike executive officials who serve at the pleasure of the government, judges of constitutional courts enjoy security of tenure. This is deliberate: if judges could be removed easily by a simple parliamentary majority or an executive order, they would be vulnerable to pressure whenever they delivered an unpopular verdict against the government of the day. The Constituent Assembly debates reflect an explicit concern that judicial independence would be meaningless without protection from arbitrary removal. At the same time, the framers did not want judges to be entirely unaccountable — hence a removal mechanism was built in, but one requiring an extraordinarily high threshold.
Constitutional Provisions Governing Removal
Supreme Court Judges
The removal of Supreme Court judges is governed by Article 124(4) and 124(5) of the Constitution.
Article 124(4) states that a judge of the Supreme Court shall not be removed from office except by an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament, supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting, and presented to the President in the same session for such removal on the ground of "proved misbehaviour or incapacity."
Article 124(5) empowers Parliament to regulate, by law, the procedure for the presentation of an address and for the investigation and proof of the misbehaviour or incapacity of a judge. This is the enabling provision under which the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 was enacted.
High Court Judges
For High Court judges, Article 218 applies the same removal procedure (Articles 124(4) and 124(5)) as is applicable to Supreme Court judges. Additionally, Article 217(1)(b) provides that a High Court judge holds office until the age of 62 years, except as provided in Article 124(4). This means the constitutional route for removing a High Court judge is textually identical to that for a Supreme Court judge — the same "proved misbehaviour or incapacity" standard, the same special majority, the same parliamentary address to the President.
It is worth noting that the word "impeachment" does not appear anywhere in the Indian Constitution in the context of judges. It has become popular shorthand — likely borrowed from the American usage — but the correct constitutional term is "removal by address."
The Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968: The Procedural Backbone
Since the Constitution only lays down the broad principle, the actual step-by-step procedure is detailed in the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968, along with the Judges (Inquiry) Rules, 1969. The process can be broken down as follows:
Step 1: Notice of Motion A motion for removal of a judge may be initiated by either House of Parliament. It requires a signed notice from either:
at least 100 members of the Lok Sabha, or
at least 50 members of the Rajya Sabha.
Step 2: Admission of the Motion The notice is submitted to the Speaker (in the Lok Sabha) or the Chairman (in the Rajya Sabha). The presiding officer has discretion to admit or refuse the motion after consulting relevant sources. If admitted, the presiding officer constitutes a three-member inquiry committee.
Step 3: Constitution of the Inquiry Committee Under Section 3 of the Act, the inquiry committee comprises:
A judge of the Supreme Court (or the Chief Justice of India),
The Chief Justice of a High Court, and
A distinguished jurist.
This committee functions as a quasi-judicial body — it frames charges, allows the judge an opportunity to respond, and can examine evidence and witnesses much like a court.
Step 4: Inquiry and Report The committee submits its findings to the Speaker/Chairman of the House that initiated the motion, stating whether the charges of misbehaviour or incapacity stand proved.
Step 5: Parliamentary Debate and Voting If the judge is found guilty, the report is placed before Parliament, and the motion for removal is taken up for debate. For the motion to succeed, it must be adopted in the same session by:
a majority of the total membership of that House, and
a majority of not less than two-thirds of members present and voting.
This must happen in both Houses of Parliament.
Step 6: Presidential Order If both Houses pass the motion with the required special majority in the same session, an address is presented to the President, who then issues an order for the removal of the judge.
This multi-layered, deliberately high-threshold process explains why removal of a sitting constitutional court judge has never actually been completed in India's history — a point that is important for aspirants to remember.
The In-House Procedure: A Parallel, Non-Statutory Mechanism
Separately from the constitutional/statutory removal process, the judiciary has evolved its own informal mechanism known as the "in-house procedure," adopted by the Supreme Court in 1999. Under this mechanism, if a complaint of misconduct is received against a judge, the Chief Justice of India (or the Chief Justice of the concerned High Court) can set up a three-member committee of judges to examine the allegations. This committee has no statutory backing under the Judges (Inquiry) Act — it is an internal, self-regulatory mechanism.
If the in-house committee finds substance in the allegations, it can recommend that the judge resign or seek voluntary retirement; if the judge refuses, the Chief Justice of India may forward the matter to the President and the Prime Minister, effectively triggering a possible parliamentary removal process, and may also decide to stop assigning judicial work to the judge concerned. This is exactly the sequence that played out in the Justice Yashwant Varma matter.
Grounds for Removal: "Proved Misbehaviour or Incapacity"
The Constitution does not define "misbehaviour" precisely, leaving it open to interpretation, but broadly the term has come to encompass:
corruption or acceptance of bribes,
financial impropriety or possession of disproportionate/unaccounted assets,
willful abuse of judicial position,
persistent failure to discharge judicial duties, and
conduct unbecoming of a judge that undermines public confidence in the judiciary.
"Incapacity" typically refers to physical or mental incapacity that renders a judge unable to perform judicial functions, though this ground has rarely been invoked.
Historical Cases: Why No Judge Has Ever Been Removed
Aspirants should be familiar with the key precedents, since they illustrate the practical difficulty of the process.
1. Justice V. Ramaswami (1993) — the first case in which impeachment proceedings actually reached a vote in Parliament. He was a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court facing allegations of financial irregularities during his tenure as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Although an inquiry committee found the charges proved, the motion for his removal failed in the Lok Sabha in 1993 because the ruling Congress party abstained from voting, and the motion could not secure the required two-thirds majority of those present and voting.
2. Justice Soumitra Sen (2011) — a judge of the Calcutta High Court facing charges of misappropriation of funds while he was a court-appointed receiver, prior to becoming a judge. The Rajya Sabha passed the motion for his removal with the requisite majority in 2011 — the first time a House of Parliament actually passed such a motion. However, before the Lok Sabha could take up the motion, Justice Sen resigned, and the process became infructuous.
3. Justice P.D. Dinakaran and Justice J.B. Pardiwala — cases where impeachment motions were initiated (against Justice Dinakaran in 2011 over land-grabbing and corruption allegations, and briefly against Justice Pardiwala over certain remarks) but both situations were resolved through resignation or withdrawal of the motion before completion of the process.
The common thread: in every instance where the process gained real momentum, the judge resigned rather than face a full vote, and no judge of a constitutional court has ever been removed through the complete Article 124(4) process to date.
The Justice Yashwant Varma Case: A Contemporary Case Study (2025–26)
This case is highly relevant for current affairs-linked answers and deserves close attention.
On 14 March 2025, firefighters responding to a blaze at the official Delhi residence of Justice Yashwant Varma (then a judge of the Delhi High Court) allegedly discovered sacks of unaccounted cash in a storeroom.
Then-Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna constituted a three-member in-house inquiry committee (comprising the Chief Justices of the Punjab & Haryana and Himachal Pradesh High Courts, and a Karnataka High Court judge) on 22 March 2025. Justice Varma was meanwhile repatriated to the Allahabad High Court and denied judicial work.
The committee's report, submitted on 4 May 2025, found the charges against Justice Varma substantiated. CJI Khanna forwarded the report to the President and the Prime Minister, effectively recommending removal proceedings.
Justice Varma refused to resign and instead challenged the in-house committee's report and the recommendation before the Supreme Court, arguing that the in-house mechanism lacked statutory backing and that only Parliament could initiate removal under Article 124(4).
In July 2025, over 100 Lok Sabha MPs and over 50 Rajya Sabha MPs (cutting across party lines) signed notices seeking Justice Varma's removal under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. The Lok Sabha Speaker admitted the motion and constituted a statutory three-member inquiry committee (comprising a Supreme Court judge, a High Court Chief Justice, and a senior advocate) under Section 3 of the Act.
In January 2026, the Supreme Court dismissed Justice Varma's petition challenging the Speaker's decision to admit the motion, allowing the statutory inquiry to proceed.
The statutory inquiry committee subsequently found the charges proved, bringing the matter to Parliament for the final stage — debate and a special-majority vote in both Houses.
Facing the prospect of a parliamentary vote, Justice Varma resigned under Article 217(1)(a), submitting his resignation to the President before the process could be completed.
This case is a textbook illustration of how India's removal mechanism actually operates in practice — the interplay between the informal in-house procedure and the formal statutory process, the judiciary's own self-regulatory instinct, and the pattern (as with Ramaswami and Sen before him) of a judge resigning rather than face the final vote.
Criticisms of the Existing Mechanism
Political threshold makes removal near-impossible: Requiring a special majority in both Houses in the same session means that even judges found guilty by an inquiry committee can escape removal purely due to political calculations, as seen in the Ramaswami case.
Excessive reliance on Parliament: Critics argue that involving politicians in judging judicial "misbehaviour" risks politicisation, since MPs may vote along party lines rather than purely on the merits of the charges.
The in-house procedure lacks statutory teeth: It is not backed by law, has no defined punishment short of removal, and has been criticised as opaque and inconsistent — different committees have handled similar allegations differently over the years.
No graded punishment: Currently, the process offers only a binary outcome — a judge either continues in office or is removed. There is no intermediate mechanism for reprimand, suspension, or reduction in pay for lesser misconduct, unlike in some other democracies.
Long and cumbersome timeline: The layered process — in-house inquiry, then statutory inquiry, then parliamentary debate — can take years, during which a judge accused of serious misconduct may continue to hold office (even if not assigned judicial work), eroding public confidence.
Reform Proposals
The Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill, introduced in 2010 (and lapsed subsequently), had proposed a National Judicial Oversight Committee, mandatory asset declaration by judges, and a mechanism for minor sanctions short of removal. It was never enacted into law.
Legal scholars have periodically suggested a Judicial Complaints Commission or independent oversight body to handle complaints of judicial misconduct at an earlier stage, reducing dependence on the drastic step of parliamentary removal.
Mandatory and public asset disclosure by judges has been proposed as a preventive, transparency-enhancing measure.
Some have suggested empowering the Chief Justice of India (in consultation with a broader collegium) with limited disciplinary powers — such as temporary suspension — pending a full removal inquiry, so that a judge under a credible cloud does not continue drawing a full judicial role and salary indefinitely.
Comparative Perspective
In the United States, federal judges are removed through a two-stage impeachment process — impeachment (akin to indictment) by a simple majority in the House of Representatives, followed by trial and conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The threshold is comparably high, and removals of federal judges have also been extremely rare historically. The United Kingdom, in contrast, allows removal of senior judges by the monarch on an address from both Houses of Parliament — again a high threshold rooted in similar constitutional logic of protecting judicial independence.
Conclusion
The mechanism for removing judges in India reflects a constitutional bargain: judicial independence is protected through an almost prohibitively high threshold for removal, while a residual accountability mechanism exists for genuinely serious misconduct. In seven decades since the Constitution came into force, this mechanism has been formally triggered only a handful of times, and never once completed to an actual removal — a fact that speaks both to the rarity of proven judicial misconduct reaching this level and to the structural difficulty embedded in the process itself. The Justice Yashwant Varma case has once again demonstrated this pattern: intense scrutiny, a credible inquiry finding wrongdoing, and, ultimately, resignation rather than removal by parliamentary vote.
For UPSC aspirants, this topic offers a rich opportunity to connect constitutional text (Articles 124, 217, 218), statutory procedure (Judges Inquiry Act, 1968), landmark precedents (Ramaswami, Soumitra Sen), and current affairs (Justice Varma) into a single, well-rounded answer — whether the question asks about judicial accountability, separation of powers, or the balance between independence and accountability in India's constitutional scheme.
Practice Questions for Self-Assessment
"The process for removal of judges in India is designed to be difficult by constitutional intent, not by accident." Discuss with reference to relevant constitutional and statutory provisions. (250 words)
Distinguish between the "in-house procedure" and the statutory removal process under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. Why do both mechanisms coexist?
Critically examine why no judge of a constitutional court has ever been removed in India despite several impeachment motions being initiated.
Discuss the case for and against introducing intermediate disciplinary measures (short of removal) for judicial misconduct in India.
This blog is intended for UPSC Civil Services Examination preparation (GS Paper II: Polity and Governance) and reflects developments up to early 2026.
