No judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court has ever been removed under Article 124(4) since the Constitution came into force. The process has been carried close to completion twice. In 1993, Justice V. Ramaswami of the Supreme Court became the first judge against whom an inquiry committee returned findings of misbehaviour; the removal motion nonetheless failed in the Lok Sabha when the ruling party abstained and the motion could not secure the required majority of the total membership. In 2011, Justice Soumitra Sen of the Calcutta High Court resigned after the Rajya Sabha had passed the removal motion but before the Lok Sabha could take it up, so the process lapsed. The pattern in both cases is the same and is the point worth carrying into an answer: the constitutional threshold is deliberately high, and the political stage has repeatedly proved harder to clear than the evidentiary one.

Judicial independence in India is protected by making judges very hard to remove. The corollary is that accountability rests on a mechanism used so rarely that its contours remain untested - which is exactly why this case is examinable. Several unsettled questions surface in it: whether a judge can end an inquiry by withdrawing from it, which the committee answered in the negative; what evidentiary standard 'proved misbehaviour' requires when the Constitution does not define misbehaviour; and how the in-house procedure of the judiciary interacts with the statutory parliamentary process. There is also the federal-institutional angle - the Supreme Court was asked to review the Speaker's decision to constitute the committee and upheld it, a reminder that each branch's role here is circumscribed. For Mains, the honest framing is a tension rather than a villain: a threshold low enough to be usable would expose judges to political pressure, while one as high as the present has never once resulted in removal.