The Supreme Court has questioned the changing political positions of successive Karnataka governments in a 15-year-old recruitment scandal, observing that the government’s shifting stances, depending on the “hues and colours” of changing political times, had left thousands of jobseekers in limbo while shielding appointments tainted by “rampant corruption and blatant nepotism”.
Striking down a 2022 Karnataka law that sought to validate the recruitment of 362 gazetted probationers, a bench of justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran said the legislation was an attempt to nullify the judgments of the Karnataka high court and the Supreme Court in 2018, which upheld the cancellation of the entire selection process. it later enacted the Karnataka Civil Services (Validation of Selection and Appointment of 2011 Batch Gazetted Probationers) Act, 2022, to revive the appointments While the government defended canceling the selection process after a CID investigation exposed widespread irregularities. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power in the state when the legislation was enacted in 2022. Nearly 138,000 people applied for the 362 Group A and B posts after the government invited applications on November 3, 2011. Of them, 91,667 appeared for the preliminary examination. After complaints of irregularities in the selection process, the government withheld the final selection list in 2013 and ordered the criminal investigation department (CID) to conduct an inquiry.
The probe revealed gross manipulation, including rampant corruption and nepotism involving officials of the Karnataka Public Service Commission (KPSC). The judgment, authored by justice Chandran, was particularly critical of the state’s changing position on the recruitment. The court also refused to accept the argument that candidates not found tainted in the CID investigation could be separated from those against whom allegations had surfaced.
The bench said the legislature could not sit in appeal over judicial decisions and undo them through a law. During the latest hearing in the top court, senior counsel Kapil Sibal, representing the incumbent Congress-led state government, said it could not support the legislation at all. “The lofty ideal stated in the legislation of providing justice to the 2011 Batch Gazetted Probationers falls flat for reason of the recruitment itself having been found tainted with corruption and nepotism by the High Court, which decision was upheld by this Court,” it said. Once the selection process itself stood vitiated, there was no scope to segregate candidates on the basis of individual culpability, it said.
