Collegium or Cozy Club? Nagaratna Isn’t Buying the Membership
Ah, the collegium system—India’s most mysterious gentlemen’s club. Entry restricted, membership rules unknown, and transparency? Please, that’s strictly against the dress code. But every so often, someone spoils the party. This time, it’s Justice BV Nagaratna, who dared to do the unthinkable: dissent.Satish Acharya’s cartoon nails it—Lady Justice, that tired figure holding her scales and blindfold, finally admits what we’ve all known: without Nagaratna’s spine, she’d collapse like a bad prop in a courtroom drama.The collegium works like an elite whatsapp group where the “seen” ticks matter more than the actual content. Judges nod, shuffle papers, smile politely, and move on. But Nagaratna clearly missed the memo: “Thou shalt not disagree in public, lest you ruin the illusion of unity.” She didn’t just miss it—she tore it up and filed it under “irrelevant.”And why not? For decades, the collegium has operated like a closed kitchen where the recipe is known only to the chefs, but the people eating it have no idea what’s in the dish—or worse, if it’s expired. Justice Nagaratna’s dissent wasn’t just about one name; it was about shining a torch into the dark pantry of judicial appointments. Spoiler: it doesn’t smell fresh.The irony is delicious. One woman, standing her ground, exposes how brittle the entire edifice is. If a single dissent rattles the system, maybe the system wasn’t so solid to begin with. Lady Justice herself, in the cartoon, doesn’t thank the collegium for support—she thanks Nagaratna for the spine. That’s as humiliating as it gets: an institution borrowing vertebrae from one lone judge.The collegium defenders will huff and puff about “unity of the bench.” But let’s be real: unity without integrity is just groupthink in robes. If courts become echo chambers, then dissenters like Nagaratna are not troublemakers—they’re the last insurance policy against collapse.And perhaps the sharpest jab of all: Nagaratna doesn’t look like she’s trying to be a hero. She just did her job. That alone is enough to make her stand out in a crowd where silence has become the loudest tradition.One spine, one voice, one dissent. Enough to remind the rest: justice doesn’t stand tall by itself—it needs courage to keep it upright.
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