He used a forged certificate to get the job. Nobody proved he was the one who forged it
Twenty-nine years after a reserved-post appointment obtained on a false caste certificate, the Himachal Pradesh High Court separates the offence of forging a document from the offence of using one, and sets aside half the conviction.
Sections 467 and 468 of the Indian Penal Code punish the making of a forged document. Section 471 punishes using one as genuine. The distinction is easy to state and easy to lose sight of at trial, because the person who benefits from a forgery is usually assumed to have produced it.
On 25 September 2026 Justice Rakesh Kainthla insisted on it, in a revision decided a dozen years after the appeal and seventeen after the conviction.
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In February 1997 Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited, then the Nathpa Jhakri Power Corporation, advertised various posts, among them Assistant Officer (P&A) at E1 Level, reserved for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates.
The accused applied for that post, annexing a certificate purportedly issued in April 1996 by the Mandal Revenue Officer, Shyampet, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. The recruitment section scrutinised the application, approved his candidature, and included him in the interview panel. He was selected, an appointment letter issued on 29 May 1997, and he accepted it.
The CBI later filed a charge-sheet for offences under Sections 420, 467, 468 and 471 IPC. The Chief Judicial Magistrate, Shimla convicted him on 20 June 2009, and the Special Judge, CBI, Shimla upheld conviction and sentence on 25 June 2014. Mr. Janesh Mahajan, Special Public Prosecutor, appeared for the CBI in the revision.
The certificate was forged — by whom?
That the certificate was forged was not what the Court disturbed. The finding it disturbed was the attribution.
There was, the Court held, no evidence that the accused had forged the certificate. The prosecution had not established who prepared it — no handwriting evidence tying him to it, no evidence of the circumstances of its making, nothing beyond the fact that a false document had been produced and that he was the person who produced it.
The Court noted the contrast with authority in which an accused was held to have forged a document because he had written part of it. Here there was no equivalent, and on that footing he could not be held liable under Sections 467 and 468.
The point is not a technicality. A person who buys a forged certificate from someone who makes them commits a serious offence, but it is not the offence of forgery. Whether he is also the maker is a question of proof, and the presumption cannot run from beneficiary to forger without evidence.
Knowledge, which was proved
The convictions that survived turn on what the accused knew, and there the prosecution succeeded on circumstantial evidence.
The defence relied on authorities holding that knowledge of the document being forged is essential to the offence under Section 471. The Court agreed with the proposition and held it satisfied: the document was forged, and the circumstantial evidence on record proved that the accused was aware of it. The cited judgments therefore did not assist him.
On Section 471 itself the Court applied the Supreme Court’s statement of its ingredients in A.S. Krishnan: fraudulent or dishonest use of a document as genuine, and knowledge or reasonable belief on the part of the user that it is forged. The section is intended to apply to persons other than the forger, though the forger himself is not excluded from its operation.
That is the provision built for this situation. It does not ask who made the document; it asks who used it knowing what it was. And the accused had used a forged certificate to secure employment.
An argument that the certificate was not a “valuable security”, relying on a decision to that effect, was held to turn on its own facts and not to apply here.
Sentence
The accused asked for leniency. The Court declined, in terms that explain why it treated the surviving offences as serious despite the passage of nearly three decades.
The post was reserved. A person who obtains it on a false certificate does not merely gain something he was not entitled to; he deprives the person for whom the benefit was meant. On that view the trial court had already taken a lenient view, and no further leniency was called for.
The order
The revision was partly allowed. The conviction and sentence under Sections 467 and 468 IPC were set aside, and the conviction and sentence under Sections 420 and 471 IPC were upheld. A modified warrant was directed to be prepared, and the records of the courts below sent back with a copy of the judgment.
The result is a conviction that now matches what the evidence established. He cheated the employer and used a document he knew to be false, and he is punished for both. He is not punished for making the document, because nobody showed that he did — and on a charge that carries the weight Section 467 does, the difference between using a forgery and manufacturing one is worth the Court’s attention even at this distance in time.