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Not one High Court in India publishes a code of conduct for its judges. Only the Madras High Court discloses anything about the conduct that can be complained against, a general notice on bribery, and only two High Courts, Tripura and Jammu & Kashmir, have ever disclosed an order imposing a sanction on a judge; the other 23 scored zero. These are among the findings of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and JALDI's Judicial Transparency Index, released on August 1, 2026, which tested all 25 High Courts against seven indicators of disciplinary accountability: whether a code of conduct exists, whether the conduct that can be complained of is specified, whether the complaint procedure is published, whether investigation timelines are disclosed, and whether complainants and the public are told the outcome.

What the report does not examine, and what the numbers alone cannot show, is that this opacity sits on top of a body of doctrine that is anything but empty. Indian courts have spent three decades building a jurisprudence of judicial misconduct. The disclosure gap the Index maps is not a doctrinal vacuum; it is a publication failure layered over a functioning, if narrow, disciplinary architecture.

That architecture begins with K. Veeraswami v. Union of India, where a Constitution Bench held that judges are public servants who can be investigated and prosecuted for corruption, but only after the Chief Justice of India's prior sanction, a filter invoked, as a recent plea before the Supreme Court in the Justice Yashwant Varma matter confirmed, without any published, public-facing procedure of its own. In Sub-Committee on Judicial Accountability v. Union of India, the Court held that Parliament's impeachment process under Article 124(4) is the only constitutionally sanctioned route to remove a judge for misconduct, a holding the Supreme Court relied on as recently as January 2026, when it dismissed Justice Varma's challenge to the Lok Sabha Speaker's constitution of an inquiry committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968.

Between the CJI's sanction and Parliament's impeachment sits the widest gap: minor misconduct that falls short of impeachable proved misbehaviour. C. Ravichandran Iyer v. Justice A.M. Bhattacharjee filled it by creating the in-house procedure, a peer-review mechanism the judgment itself conceded had no legal sanction. That procedure is precisely what the Supreme Court invoked after unaccounted cash was found at Justice Varma's official residence in March 2025, and, unusually, published its 25-page in-house inquiry report, breaking from a process the Court itself has previously insisted remains confidential. And where all else has failed, the Court has reached for a fourth, blunter instrument: in In Re: Justice C.S. Karnan, a seven-judge bench convicted a sitting High Court judge of criminal contempt and sentenced him to six months imprisonment, not through any disciplinary process, published or otherwise, but by treating the judiciary's own authority to punish contempt as a backstop.

Four routes, then, not zero: prosecution after CJI sanction, impeachment under the 1968 Act, in-house peer review, and contempt as a last resort. Each was built for a different degree of misconduct, and none of them, on its own, was designed to answer what happens once a judge exits the process midway. The Varma matter has now tested all four in a single case, and produced exactly that question.

After the March 2025 fire, then-CJI Sanjiv Khanna's in-house committee found the allegations serious enough to warrant removal proceedings and forwarded its report to the President and the Prime Minister. In July 2025, 146 Lok Sabha members signed a notice invoking Articles 124, 217 and 218 of the Constitution, and Speaker Om Birla constituted a three-member committee under the 1968 Act the following month. In April 2026, Justice Varma resigned. The committee, following the precedent of judges who resigned mid-proceedings before him, such as Justice Soumitra Sen, kept going anyway. This month, it found all three Articles of Charge against him proved: unexplained currency in his official residence, failure to preserve material evidence, and evasive and misleading explanations. The report was tabled in Parliament regardless of the resignation.

That sequence answers one question and opens another. It shows the 1968 Act's machinery can function as designed: a complaint, an investigation, evidence weighed, guilt found. What it does not resolve is whether a judge's resignation can still moot a disciplinary finding that has already been completed, an issue LiveLaw's own reporting on the matter has flagged as live: the President has not formally notified acceptance of Justice Varma's resignation, the Allahabad High Court's website continued to list him as a sitting judge, and Senior Advocate Raju Ramachandran has suggested that the power to accept a resignation mid-proceedings should sit with the Chief Justice of India rather than the executive, precisely to prevent judicial independence from being used as an exit ramp from accountability.

This is the point at which the Transparency Index and the case law meet. The Varma case became visible to the public only because of two departures from the norm: the Supreme Court chose to publish its in-house report, which it does not normally do, and the process ran long enough, and drew enough parliamentary attention, that it could not be quietly absorbed. Every other element of the same architecture, the Veeraswami sanction, the in-house procedure the Court has used against other judges without comparable public disclosure, the outcomes of investigations the Committee on In-House Procedure has conducted over three decades, remains as undisclosed today as the Index found it to be. The Supreme Court's own Restatement of Values of Judicial Life sets ethical standards for judges, but it is a voluntary code with no enforcement mechanism, and nothing published tells the public what happens when a judge falls short of it.

The Index's own comparator, the United Kingdom's Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, does not have better doctrine than India's courts; arguably it has less, since it operates under a statute rather than three decades of Constitution Bench reasoning. What it has is a Disciplinary Statements page that publishes the conduct investigated, the process followed, and the outcome, as a matter of course rather than exception. The Supreme Court's own 2025 decision to publicly declare its judge's assets shows India's judiciary can make that same shift when it commits to one; disciplinary information has so far received no comparable commitment.

The report's own recommendations map onto these doctrinal gaps almost exactly, even though the report does not frame them that way. It asks courts to publish a code of conduct, which would give content to the vague standard of misbehaviour that Ravichandran Iyer left undefined. It asks for an accessible complaint mechanism, which would supply the public procedure that Veeraswami's sanction requirement has functioned without for three decades. And it asks for published sanction decisions, which would turn what is currently visible only by accident, as in the Varma matter, into the default rather than the exception.

Read together, the report and the case law point to a structural conclusion the report alone does not reach: India's judiciary has never lacked the doctrine to hold a judge accountable. What it has lacked, at every step between a complaint and a sanction, is a published record ordinary citizens can actually see, which is why a case as extensively litigated as Justice Varma's became a public event only by accident of two rare exceptions, and why the disciplinary architecture built since Veeraswami will keep producing outcomes the public has no way of knowing about, until publication becomes the rule rather than the exception.

Author is an LL.M. Research Scholar at Hamdard Institute of Legal Studies and Research, Jamia Hamdard. Views are personal.

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