Justice Ujjal Bhuyan ranks 18th in the hierarchy of 33 Judges of the Supreme Court (currently with one vacancy). He began his term on July 14, 2023, and is set to retire on August 1, 2029. Although he is not in the line of succession of Chief Justice of India (CJI), his public articulation of issues concerning the Supreme Court is capable of making him its rare conscience keeper, the likes of whom the court has not seen in recent years. Consider his statements during the past one week, first at the ILS Law College in Pune, while delivering the G.V. Pandit Memorial Lecture, and later at an international legal conference organised by the Supreme Court Advocates on Record Association at Panaji. We need Judges who can stand erectIt will be a sad day for our judiciary, and by extension for our democracy, if the decision in a case becomes a foregone conclusion the moment a case is listed before a particular Judge or a particular bench.We don’t need paramilitary forces to guard our courts. The threat to judicial independence, many say, is from within the court. Why should a Judge be transferred from one high court to another merely because they have passed certain inconvenient orders against the government? Does it not affect the independence of the judiciary?When it is noted in the Collegium Resolution itself that a particular high court Judge who has been transferred to a different high court was subsequently transferred to another high court by modifying the earlier recommendation on reconsideration sought for by the Union government, does it not compromise the integrity of the Collegium system?When the Collegium itself records in its minutes that the transfer of a high court Judge was being made at the request of the Union government, it reveals a striking intrusion of executive influence into what is constitutionally supposed to be an independent process. By the very nature of things, the Union government can have no say in the matter of transfer and posting of high court Judges. It reflects a clear admission of the Executive influencing the Collegium decisions – the very thing that it seeks to prevent. Independence of the Judiciary must be maintained at all costs to ensure its continued relevance and legitimacy. If we lose our credibility, nothing will be left of our judiciary. Judges will be there. Courts will be there. They will adjudicate. But its heart and soul will evaporate. It is natural for a judge to have a political or ideological leaning. But that should not cloud their decision-making. They should not follow their political ideology, but the constitutional principles. The very existence of the Supreme Court is for upholding personal liberty and human rights. The Supreme Court is not established to justify executive action denying liberty and violation of human rights.When we apply principles of laws, there can’t be a multiplicity of views in the Supreme Court. When several benches of the top court speak in different voices while expounding the law, it risks not only conveying a wrong message to the courts below but also undermines the court’s credibility among foreign nations. There can’t be divergence of views on the fundamentals on which our legal system exists. While polyvocality has been seen by some Judges as a sign of diversity on the bench, others view it as a serious issue undermining the court’s credibility. Taken together, the Pune and Panaji speeches are significant for two reasons. First, they show a sitting Supreme Court judge speaking publicly about pressures on judicial independence from two directions at once: the perceived susceptibility of transfer decisions to executive preferences, and the risk that judicial doctrine in liberty-affecting domains begins to accommodate the state’s convenience. Second, they place dissent – usually expressed through judgements – into a public-facing register, inviting the public to consider what such candour reveals about internal dynamics within the court.Executive foothold in the collegium systemJustice Bhuyan’s remarks there were anchored to a specific and already public factual record: collegium resolutions that, in at least one instance, expressly noted that a change in a transfer recommendation was made on reconsideration sought by the government, in the context of the transfer of Justice Atul Sreedharan, currently a Judge of the Allahabad high court. The collegium system was fashioned by the court to reduce executive influence in appointments and transfers; if the collegium itself memorialises governmental reconsideration in the transfer record, it creates an appearance that the executive has acquired a foothold in a space that the court has long described as internal and insulated. Even if the collegium remains the formal decision-maker, the optics of recorded “reconsideration” complicate the claim that transfers are exclusively judicial business.That point matters because transfer power has always been defended on a particular constitutional rationale. Transfers are meant to serve administration of justice – addressing local pressures, balancing judicial resources, preventing the growth of entrenched networks, and responding to institutional needs. Justice Bhuyan’s formulation follows that orthodox justification: transfers are legitimate when they further administration of justice; they become troubling when they look like responses to “inconvenient orders” or to executive sensitivities. In that framing, the real threat is neither a formal amendment nor an overt executive veto. It is gradual normalisation of informal influence, coupled with diminished willingness within the judiciary to treat such influence as unacceptable.Constitutional anxietiesJustice Bhuyan’s lecture at Panaji shifts the lens from administration to adjudication, yet the underlying concern remains legitimacy. Justice Bhuyan’s remarks there were reported against the backdrop of the split verdict on Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The provision, introduced in 2018, requires prior approval before inquiry or investigation against public servants for certain decisions taken in official capacity. The split itself is illustrative: Justice B. V. Nagarathna viewed the provision as impermissibly protective and constitutionally suspect; Justice K.V. Viswanathan preferred a remedial route, warning against striking it down wholesale and suggesting institutional alternatives such as Lokpal/Lokayukta screening. In Panaji, Justice Bhuyan sided with the thrust of the critique of prior-approval barriers, arguing that the mechanism can operate like a veto at the threshold.Judges generally avoid public commentary on live controversies to protect the appearance of impartiality and to ensure that the court’s internal process – especially after a split – unfolds without external cross-currents. When a matter is pending for reconstitution, the administrative discretion of the Chief Justice (in listing and bench composition) becomes part of the institutional story. Public interventions can be read, fairly or unfairly, as attempts to shape that next step.Yet, Justice Bhuyan’s choice also reflects a competing constitutional impulse: transparency about institutional anxieties that may otherwise remain submerged. His Panaji remarks read like an articulation of a principle about investigative vetoes and the architecture of accountability, delivered in the language of a “student of law.” That rhetorical positioning matters: he presented his view as a constitutional-policy concern, even as the court’s split indicates that the same concern is alive within the institution’s decisional process.The deeper implication is about dissent within the Supreme Court. Dissent is an ordinary feature of multi-member constitutional courts. What is unusual here is dissent moving from the published page into public lectures and conferences, and doing so in close succession across topics that implicate both the judiciary’s internal governance (transfers) and its external-facing constitutional function (liberty and anti-corruption enforcement). Justice Bhuyan’s Pune lecture speaks to the judiciary’s self-regulation; the one at Panaji speaks to the judiciary’s public role as a check on state power. Both are tied together by his insistence that the court’s authority ultimately rests on public trust and perceived integrity.Institutional introspectionOne way to read these speeches is as an attempt to reclaim a vocabulary of judicial self-scrutiny. Justice Bhuyan’s warning that the “biggest threat” can come from within fits a pattern of institutional introspection that senior judges occasionally voice when they believe internal practices risk undermining the court’s moral capital. Before him, Justice Nagarathna’s leaked dissent note in the Collegium, when it recommended elevation of Justice V.M. Pancholi, was a result of such concern. The risk, of course, is that public criticism of internal processes supplies ammunition to those who already argue that the court is factional or politically responsive. The benefit is that it forces uncomfortable questions into the open: What does “independence” require when influence is subtle, mediated through procedure, or evidenced only by what collegium resolutions themselves record?If the Pune and Panaji remarks signal anything about the future, it is this: the contest over judicial independence is no longer framed only as executive versus judiciary. It is also about whether the judiciary can maintain internal discipline – transparent enough to sustain legitimacy, cohesive enough to avoid doctrinal drift, and firm enough to resist informal encroachment. Justice Bhuyan’s decision to say these things publicly will remain debated. But the facts he chose – transfer records that acknowledge governmental reconsideration, and a split verdict over a legal barrier that can slow corruption investigations – ensure that the debate is anchored in concrete institutional episodes rather than mere rhetoric. Such public interventions by a sitting Judge could provide the safety valve, the lack of which was witnessed in 2018 when four judges of the court held a historic press conference to seek accountability from the then CJI, Dipak Misra.