Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul's memoir, entitled Without Fear or Favour, has started a debate. The former judge said that ex-Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud was too deferential to the government on appointments. He recalled a Collegium meeting where, he says, the Chief Justice took him aside and wondered whether to phone the government to check its view on a name.

Chandrachud has responded that he has not read the book. He says the meetings were respectful, that Kaul never recorded a dissent and that the government has a legitimate role in appointments.

We will never see the minutes of that meeting. But we can look at something else: the dates. Every Collegium recommendation has a date. So does every government notification. If names are being settled with the government before the Collegium meets, the government has little reason to sit on them afterwards and the gap between the two dates should shrink.

Between October 2017 - when the Collegium began putting its resolutions online - and October 2026, 63 judges were recommended for Supreme Court elevation in 24 rounds. For each judge, I noted the date of the Collegium's resolution and the date on which the government notified the appointment. Here's what the numbers reveal.

Across all 63 judges, the usual wait was seven days. But that figure hides two very different periods.

Before 2023, the government often took its time. Indu Malhotra waited 106 days. KM Joseph waited 205 days. His name was sent back and when he was finally appointed, he was placed below two judges who had been recommended months after him. Dipankar Datta waited 76 days. Five judges recommended in December 2022 waited 53 days.

From January 2023, the picture changes completely. 28 judges were recommended in 13 rounds and not one waited more than 10 days. The usual wait fell to five days. I ran standard statistical tests on these figures (a Mann–Whitney test gives p = 0.004) and the drop is far too large to be put down to chance.

The turning point is easy to find. On February 3, 2023, a bench of Justices Kaul and AS Oka was hearing a contempt case about delays in appointments. Justice Kaul pointed out that five names sent in December were still pending. The Attorney General told the Court that the warrants would be issued soon. They were issued the very next day. Since then, every Supreme Court name has been cleared within about a week.

Nor is this tied to one Chief Justice. The usual wait was seven days under CJI Chandrachud, five under CJI Sanjiv Khanna, three under CJI BR Gavai and five under CJI Surya Kant. That sits well with Justice Kaul's own remark that such prior talks with the government went on both before and after Chandrachud.

Speed is not a bad thing in itself. Long delays hurt litigants and the judges kept waiting. But speed of this kind needs an explanation.

One reading is that the government simply agrees with every name the judges choose. The other is that the disagreements are sorted out before the choice is made, away from public view. The data alone cannot settle this. There are, however, signs that the Collegium does bend. In 2019, it changed Justice Akil Kureshi's appointment from Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh to Chief Justice of Tripura after the government wrote to it. In October 2025, it changed Justice Atul Sreedharan's transfer from Chhattisgarh to Allahabad, openly on reconsideration sought by the government.

This matters because the Supreme Court has said time and again that the judiciary must have the final word on appointments. That was the point of the Second Judges Case in 1993. It was also the reason the court struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission in 2015. The framers, in fact, wanted neither side to hold a veto. Dr Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly on May 24, 1949 that giving the Chief Justice a veto would hand him a power the Assembly was not willing to give even to the government. If the Court now takes the government's view before it decides, it has won primacy in the courtroom and given it up in the meeting room.

The speed the government shows for approving elevations to the Supreme Court is not the same for elevations to the High Court.

Senior Advocate Saurabh Kirpal was recommended for the Delhi High Court and the Collegium repeated its recommendation in January 2023. In September 2026, his file was still pending, the oldest of 25 such names with the government. That is more than 1,760 days after the Supreme Court Collegium first approved him.

Justices Amitesh Banerjee and Sakya Sen were approved for the Calcutta High Court in July 2019. The government sent their names back twice. The Collegium repeated them twice and said that the government could not keep returning the same proposal. R John Sathyan was skipped while others from the same list for the Madras High Court were appointed. The Collegium objected to the loss of his seniority. The proposal to make Justice S Muralidhar Chief Justice of the Madras High Court got no reply at all. The Collegium withdrew it after 203 days.

This is still going on. In April 2026, the Collegium recommended two names for the Kerala High Court together. The Centre notified one in ten days. Senior Advocate Liz Mathew was still waiting in October, five months later.

In late 2023, Justice Kaul's Bench was pressing the government on exactly these delays. In September, it said it would list the case every 10 days. In November, it told the government that its pick-and-choose approach must stop. On December 5, 2023, the case was taken off the list. Kaul said in open court that he had not deleted it. He retired three weeks later. In September 2026, Prashant Bhushan told the present Chief Justice that the related petition had not been listed since December 2023.

The Chief Justice is the master of the roster. That is settled law. Kaul now says CJI Chandrachud took the matter away. The one case that was holding the government to account on appointments has gone quiet.

In April 2021, a Bench of Chief Justice SA Bobde and Justices Kaul and Surya Kant set time limits for the government in High Court appointments. A name repeated by the Collegium, it said, should be cleared within three to four weeks.

Yet, CJI Bobde's own Collegium did not recommend a single judge to the Supreme Court during his entire term. Between August 28, 2019 and August 17, 2021, there was no Supreme Court recommendation at all. The longest delay in my data was caused not by the government, but by judges who could not agree.

The same gap shows up on transparency. In 2019, a Constitution Bench held that the Chief Justice's office comes under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Justice Chandrachud wrote then that the criteria for appointing judges must be placed in the public domain and that independence is secured through accountability. In 2017, the Collegium had promised to upload all its decisions with reasons.

Now look at what actually happened. In December 2018, the Collegium decided to elevate two Chief Justices. That decision was never uploaded. After Justice Madan Lokur retired, the Collegium picked two other judges instead and Justice Lokur said publicly that he was disappointed. When an RTI applicant asked for the record of that meeting, the Supreme Court turned her down in December 2022, holding that Collegium discussions are not for the public domain. From October 2019, the Collegium stopped giving reasons. In January 2023, the Chandrachud Collegium published detailed reasons on some names and that deserves credit. But by November 2025, the Collegium had again decided not to publish reasons. In 2026, a sitting judge, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, questioned this in public.

When Justice BV Nagarathna dissented on an appointment in August 2025, her dissent note was not uploaded.

So when Chandrachud points out that Kaul recorded no dissent, the reply is simple. The Collegium decides what goes on record and what stays hidden. An argument built on a missing record, in a system designed to keep records out of sight, does not prove much.

Fairness cuts both ways. Justice Kaul sat in the Collegium from mid-2022 to December 2023 and I could find no dissent recorded by him in that period. Dissent was possible. Justice KM Joseph's reservation on one name was printed in the resolution of January 31, 2023.

Justice Kaul himself had written to Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi in 2019 objecting to a supersession. It is fair to ask why his objection now appears in a 2026 book and not in a 2023 resolution.

The answer says more about the system than about the man. Judges speak freely only after they leave. A secret process keeps out public scrutiny, but it also keeps the judges inside it quiet. What comes out later, in memoirs, cannot be tested. It becomes a contest of reputations, which is exactly what we are watching now.

None of this needs a constitutional amendment. The government and the Court have been arguing over a revised Memorandum of Procedure since the NJAC judgment. It should include four things.

First, a record of consultation. Any input from the government on a name should be noted along with its date. If talking to the government is legitimate, as Justice Chandrachud says, it can be done in the open.

Second, reasons and dissents should be published, as promised in 2017. A judge who dissents should be able to have the note uploaded.

Third, there should be time limits for both sides. The 2021 limits should apply to the Collegium too, with a rule that a repeated name is treated as cleared if the government does not act. The government should not be allowed to split lists and the Collegium too should have a deadline, so that a two-year freeze does not happen again.

Fourth, cases about appointment delays should go to a bench chosen by a fixed rule, not by the Chief Justice whose own Collegium is involved.

The Kaul–Chandrachud row is being argued as a question of who is right. That is the wrong question. The record shows a system that is quick at the top and slow below, firm with the government on paper and quiet in practice, and open about others while closed about itself.

In 1993, the Supreme Court took charge of appointments to keep the executive out. 33 years on, the question is whether the Court will follow the standards it sets for everyone else. Until the Collegium keeps a proper record of its own work, a retired judge's memoir will remain the closest thing to one that the public gets.

Shashank Shekhar is an Assistant Professor of Law at Lloyd Law College, Greater Noida and a Research Scholar at Faculty of Law, Jamia Millia Islamia.