Supreme Court: The Glass House on Tilak Marg
The Supreme Court wants five years of private universities’ books. It still cannot get its own judges to put their assets on a website. When cash is found in a judge’s bungalow, the same system calls a demand for an FIR “cheap publicity.”
The Supreme Court wants five years of private universities’ books. It still cannot get its own judges to put their assets on a website. When cash is found in a judge’s bungalow, the same system calls a demand for an FIR “cheap publicity.”
On 17 September 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah and Justice N.V. Anjaria told every private university in India to open its books. Not a summary. Not a brochure. Five years of audited accounts, fee heads, surplus investments, payments to people who do not teach, land granted by the state, legal relaxations, who admits students, who sets papers, who marks scripts, who handles the money, and, from January 2025, how many classes were assigned and how many were actually taken. The Union, the states and the Union Territories have six weeks. Affidavits through chief secretaries. Next date: 19 November 2026. Cause title: Ayesha Jain v. Amity University, Noida & Ors.
The line the bench wrote into the order is the sort of sentence that looks noble on paper: no private university shall be run as a profit-making institution. A “cushion” for salaries and operations is permitted. Diversion is not.
It is a serious demand. It is also a lecture delivered from a glass house whose own curtains still do not open.
The sermon and the ledger
Private universities in India collect fees that would make a public college blush. Many sit on land allotted or eased by governments. The Court’s curiosity about that combination is not frivolous. Students have a right to know whether “development fund” and “special event” are education or extraction.
The problem is not the curiosity. The problem is the preacher.
The same constitutional court that now wants five years of university cash-flows has spent decades treating its own wealth as a family secret. Judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts are not required by statute to publish annual asset statements the way candidates for office must. The Lokpal framework that forces other public functionaries into the open was never made to fit the robe. A Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill that would have required declarations and created a process beyond impeachment was allowed to lapse. What remains is a 1997 “Restatement of Values of Judicial Life,” a Full Court resolution, and the eternal Indian substitute for law: a promise, uploaded when convenient, ignored when not.
In April 2025, after a fire at a judge’s official residence made the word “cash” unsayable in polite legal company, the Full Court of the Supreme Court resolved that judges’ asset declarations would go on the Court’s website. That was not a sudden conversion to sunlight. It was damage control. Even then, the first upload was incomplete.
On 6 May 2025, ThePrint reported the official picture: 21 of 33 sitting Supreme Court judges had their movable and immovable assets on the portal. Twelve had not. The registry said the rest were “being collated.” Among the twelve whose details had not yet been uploaded was Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah — the same judge who, sixteen months later, would sit on the bench demanding five-year audited trails from private universities.
The declarations that did go up were not forensic audits. They were self-written lists: flats, fixed deposits, mutual funds, gold, a home loan here, a car loan there. No five-year utilisation statement. No named third parties who received payments unconnected with judging. No classroom-equivalent of “how many sittings were assigned and how many were held.” No chief secretary standing surety for the truth of it.
If a private university tried that quality of disclosure in November, the same Court would call it evasion.
Twelve percent is not a culture. It is a refusal.
The High Courts are worse, and the numbers are not a matter of opinion.
The Hindu, 6 April 2025: of 769 sitting judges across 25 High Courts, only 95 — 12.35 per cent — had publicly uploaded assets and liabilities on their court websites. The trigger for even counting them was the same fire that forced the Supreme Court into its April resolution.
Break the 12.35 per cent open and the map of shame is precise.
- Kerala High Court: 41 of 44 judges — 93.18 per cent.
- Himachal Pradesh High Court: 11 of 12 — 91.66 per cent.
- Punjab and Haryana: a partial showing.
- Delhi High Court: 7 of 38, down from 29 of 35 in 2018. The capital’s own High Court went backwards.
- Madras High Court: 5 of 65.
- Chhattisgarh High Court: 1 of 16.
Business Standard, working off the same season of data, recorded that eighteen High Courts — including Allahabad, Bombay, Calcutta, Gujarat, Patna, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana and others — had no publicly disclosed asset information at all for their sitting judges. In August 2023, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice had already told the government to legislate annual public disclosure by Supreme Court and High Court judges. Parliament recommended. The robes declined.
So let us speak the sentence the universities are about to live under, and turn it around.
A vice-chancellor who cannot show five years of audited use of student fees is, in the Court’s new language, a suspect of diversion. A High Court judge who will not put a one-page list of flats and FDs on his own court’s website is, in the judiciary’s old language, a guardian of independence.
One standard for the fee receipt. Another for the gavel.
How the fire became a resolution, and the resolution became a shrug
On the night of 14–15 March 2025, firefighters went to 30, Tughlaq Crescent, New Delhi, the official residence of Justice Yashwant Varma, then a judge of the Delhi High Court. They were there for a blaze. What entered the public record afterwards was not only smoke. Stacks of currency — burnt, half-burnt, wet ₹500 notes — were found in a storeroom attached to the premises. Media accounts spoke of a large haul; some reports used a figure of nearly ₹15 crore. The later parliamentary inquiry did not fix a precise rupee total. It did not need to. The charge that survived was simpler and uglier: substantial unexplained ₹500 notes on premises under the judge’s effective control.
Justice Varma denied knowledge, alleged a conspiracy, and said the storeroom was not in his control. An in-house committee constituted by then Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna — Punjab and Haryana High Court Chief Justice Sheel Nagu, Himachal Pradesh High Court Chief Justice G.S. Sandhawalia, and Karnataka High Court Justice Anu Sivaraman — reported in May 2025. The then CJI asked Varma to resign or face removal. He was transferred back to the Allahabad High Court, sworn on 5 April 2025, and kept off judicial work. On 12 August 2025, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla admitted a motion for removal and constituted a committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968: Supreme Court judge Aravind Kumar, Bombay High Court Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, and senior advocate B.V. Acharya.
Varma resigned in April 2026, while that inquiry was still on. Resignation is the Indian judiciary’s favourite trapdoor. It ends the salary and the roster. It does not answer the only question that matters to a republic: was there unaccounted cash in a constitutional functionary’s official house, and will the ordinary criminal law be allowed to ask?
The parliamentary committee did not wait for the trapdoor to become a tombstone. It completed the work. Its report, submitted to the Speaker on 18 May 2026 and tabled in Parliament on 12 August 2026, found all three charges proved for the purpose of the removal process:
- discovery and possession of substantial unexplained ₹500 denomination notes in the storeroom of the official residence;
- failure to preserve material evidence, and interference with it;
- evasive, incomplete and misleading explanations, lacking the candour expected of a constitutional functionary.
The panel stopped short of a criminal-law finding that the cash “belonged” to Varma as an accused in a trial. That distinction will be quoted for years by those who want the story to end. It should not be allowed to. The committee’s own words are enough: unexplained cash, on official premises, under effective control, evidence not preserved, explanations not straight.
A private university that produced that record in November would not be patted on the head and told to maintain a “reasonable cushion.”
“Cheap publicity.” “Wild witch hunt.” The vocabulary of a closed shop
On 7 August 2026, advocate Ghanshyam Upadhyay asked the Supreme Court to do the unglamorous thing: register an FIR and order a monitored criminal investigation. His point was not complicated. A High Court judge is a public servant. Resignation is not a pardon. Unaccounted cash, if the allegations are true, does not become accounted cash because the man who occupied the bungalow has stopped drawing a judge’s pay.
The bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe did not try the facts. It did not send the papers to a magistrate with a direction. It did not even pretend that a parliamentary finding of “charges proved” created a public-interest reason to let the police do what police do when ₹500 notes are found in anyone else’s house.
It said this:
“All cheap publicity. We are not inclined to entertain this. Dismissed.”
Justice Narasimha added that an advocate was misusing the judicial process.
On 21 September 2026 — four days after the same Supreme Court told private universities to open five years of books — the Delhi High Court faced the same petitioner on the same demand. Justice Amit Bansal refused to hear it. The phrase this time was not “cheap publicity.” It was richer.
“I’m not entertaining this. This is a wild witch hunt. You have nothing better to do?”
The court questioned locus, pointed to the police and the magistrate, and watched the plea go. The Hindu recorded the hearing. The Indian Express recorded that a parliamentary inquiry committee had already held the three charges proved. The High Court still found the request for an FIR too wild to touch.
Sit with those two phrases.
When a student case expands into a nationwide raid on university finance, that is “larger public interest.”
When a citizen-lawyer asks that burnt currency in a judge’s official storeroom be treated as a police matter, that is “cheap publicity.”
When states are ordered to extract classroom logs from private colleges, that is accountability.
When the Delhi High Court is asked to let an investigation begin against a former colleague, that is a “wild witch hunt.”
The universities must name the person who evaluates answer sheets. The judiciary will not even let a first information report be born without sneering at the midwife.
They have known the principle for years. They apply it outward.
This is not a new hypocrisy. It is an old one with a new target.
On 13 November 2019, a five-judge Constitution Bench in CPIO, Supreme Court of India v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal held that the office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority under the Right to Information Act. Judicial independence, the Court said, is not the enemy of transparency. Asset declarations are not automatically a private diary. The fiduciary excuse — that judges declare only to the Chief Justice as a father-figure — was cut down. Then the Court did what it often does after a large principle: it left the actual contents of those declarations to case-by-case balancing, third-party notice, and the slow grind of the CPIO. Principle in the headnote. Fog in the file.
In 1997 the Court told itself that judges must not do things that erode public faith. In 2025 it told itself that assets would go on a website. In 2026 it told private universities that education is a public function and money collected for it cannot become private profit.
Apply that last sentence to the robe.
Judging is a public function. The salary is public money. The bungalow is public property. The power to jail, to strike down a statute, to close a university, to demand a chief secretary’s affidavit, is public power. If “diversion of institutional resources away from their educational purpose” is the sin in Noida, what is unexplained cash in a government storeroom in Tughlaq Crescent? If payments to persons “not directly involved in educational functions” must be listed by a trust that runs a college, why is there no mandatory, annual, itemised public ledger of every judge’s family transactions, related-party holdings, and gifts?
The answer is not in the Constitution. The answer is in the guild.
Impeachment is designed to be almost impossible. In-house inquiry is designed to be almost private. Resignation is designed to be almost final. “Cheap publicity” is designed to make the next lawyer think twice. The universities have no such guild. They have fee-paying parents, and now they have six weeks.
The November test the Court will not sit for
On 19 November 2026 the Supreme Court will look at affidavits from the Union and the states. It will be entitled to ask whether a private university used a development fund as a second till. It will be entitled to ask who signed the admission list. It will be entitled to ask whether a medical college’s hospital exists in brick or only in a recognition file.
It will not, on present form, ask itself the matching questions.
How many High Court judges have still published nothing?
Why did Delhi’s disclosure collapse from 29 of 35 to 7 of 38?
Why did eighteen High Courts put up a blank page and call it independence?
Why is asset publication a Full Court “resolution” and not a rule with a date, a format, a penalty, and an independent audit?
Why did a parliamentary committee’s finding that three charges were proved still leave the criminal process begging at the door, only to be told it was a witch hunt?
Why does “public interest” swell to the size of the republic when the subject is a private university, and shrink to the size of a press note when the subject is a judge?
The Amanullah–Anjaria order is not wrong about universities. The vice in Indian private higher education is real: high fees, public land, weak inspection, surplus that behaves like profit. None of that is cancelled because the Court is inconsistent. The inconsistency is a second vice. It is the vice of a forum that has appointed itself the conscience of every other institution and then declared its own conscience a family matter.
A court that wants five years of someone else’s accounts should be able to produce one clean year of its own, from every judge, on every High Court website, without waiting for the next fire. A court that uses “public interest” as a search warrant for university ledgers should not use “cheap publicity” as a bolt on the police station door. A court that tells education it cannot be a business should not run accountability as a private club.
Until that happens, the 17 September order will read as it now reads: a powerful, detailed, legitimate interrogation of private universities — delivered by a judiciary that still cannot, or will not, interrogate itself with the same appetite.
The universities have been told to show where the money went.
The judges have been told they may keep the question.
That is not independence.
That is a double entry in the only book that never gets audited.
Sources for the figures and quotations above include The420.in and contemporaneous reports of the 17 September 2026 order; ThePrint and The Hindu on the May 2025 Supreme Court upload of 21 of 33 judges; The Hindu and Business Standard on 95 of 769 High Court judges (12.35 per cent); LiveLaw, The Hindu, Hindustan Times and LawBeat on the 7 August 2026 “cheap publicity” dismissal; The Hindu and The Indian Express on the 21 September 2026 Delhi High Court “wild witch hunt” hearing; and the August 2026 parliamentary committee reporting on the Varma charges. Where official findings stop short of a criminal conviction, this piece says so.
