Supreme Court strikes down Karnataka Act reviving tainted 2011 KPSC recruitment, 2022 appointments to end
Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K. Vinod Chandran hold the 2022 validation Act unconstitutional for nullifying judgments that upheld cancellation of a corruption-tainted selection, and order a fresh recruitment with one-time age relaxation for the untainted appointees and the six appellants.
A State legislature cannot pass a law to undo a recruitment cancellation that the High Court and the Supreme Court have both upheld. On 29 October 2026 the Supreme Court struck down the Karnataka Civil Services (Validation of Selection and Appointment of 2011 Batch Gazetted Probationers) Act, 2022 as unconstitutional, set aside two Karnataka High Court orders that had upheld it, and held that the appointments made under it to the State’s Group A and B services must come to an end. A bench of Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K. Vinod Chandran allowed the appeals of Srinivasa T. and five other unsuccessful candidates who had fought the 2011 Karnataka Public Service Commission recruitment through two rounds of litigation, watched it cancelled for corruption and nepotism, and then saw the State revive it by statute. The bench directed a fresh recruitment for the vacant posts, with a one-time age relaxation for the six appellants, the appointees not found tainted, and the petitioners still before the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal.
The judgment, written by Justice Vinod Chandran, opens with an unattributed epigraph on politics and its casualties: when the winds change direction, “it is the common man, who gets caught in the storm”. It is marked non-reportable. Its reasoning is spare, because the State itself did not defend the law. Kapil Sibal, senior counsel for Karnataka, told the bench at the outset that the legislation could not be supported at all.
From 1,38,307 applicants to a CID inquiry
The story begins on 3 November 2011, when the Karnataka government notified recruitment to 362 posts of Group A and B officers under the Karnataka Recruitment of Gazetted Probationers (Appointment by Competitive Examinations) Rules, 1997. The scale was enormous. A total of 1,38,307 candidates applied; 91,667 sat the preliminary examination; 6,211 qualified for the mains; and 1,090 were called for interview.
In 2013, acting on the Advocate General’s advice after a complaint of illegalities in the selection, the State withheld publication of the final select list and handed an inquiry to the State CID. What the inquiry found, in the judgment’s words, was gross manipulation of the recruitment process, including rampant corruption and blatant nepotism by officials of the KPSC. The State cancelled the entire recruitment.
The selected candidates went to the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal, which quashed the government order. But a bunch of public interest litigations filed by aggrieved candidates, including the present appellants, against the Tribunal’s order succeeded in the High Court. The State admitted the irregularities, and the High Court affirmed the cancellation of the selection list dated 21 March 2014.
Two rounds up to the Supreme Court, and two defeats for the selected
The High Court’s order was then challenged in three special leave petitions, which the Supreme Court dismissed in Avinash C. and Ors. v. State of Karnataka and Ors., Civil Appeal Nos. 3543-3555 of 2018. The judgment on Wednesday recalled what that order had drawn from the High Court’s findings: call records between candidates and members of the KPSC; interview marks so identical, in the case of at least 566 candidates, that they revealed no objective assessment by individual members; a digital video recorder in the KPSC building replaced to destroy evidence; and the appearance of extraneous reasons in the award of marks. The Court refused to interfere with an annulment the State had itself carried out and the High Court had affirmed. To the argument that only some candidates had been found tainted, the Court answered that when the selection itself is tainted, separating tainted from untainted candidates would only interfere with the purity of the process. One door was left ajar: those who said the written examination was not vitiated, and that the selection could continue from the interview stage, were directed to raise that before the High Court.
They did. Interlocutory applications were filed in the disposed-of PILs seeking restoration of the recruitment from the stage of publication of the written examination results. The High Court refused. It found the revelations in the preliminary investigation report, which it reproduced, outrageous and scandalous, and the irregularities in the evaluation of answer scripts shockingly disgraceful, shaking the confidence reposed in a Public Service Commission, a constitutional body meant to make recruitments without taint. That refusal too was challenged in the Supreme Court, without success.
A validation Act after a decade, and a cryptic High Court order
More than a decade after the recruitment began, with the political currents having changed, the Karnataka legislature enacted the Act of 2022. The unsuccessful candidates who had been pursuing the matter challenged it before the Tribunal by a petition filed on 15 March 2022. On 23 March 2022, an individual filed a writ petition in the High Court against the same Act. The High Court dismissed that writ petition by what the Supreme Court called a cryptic order, dated 21 April 2022. Because of that order, the Tribunal refused the appellants interim relief; their challenge to that refusal was rejected by the High Court on 23 August 2022, following its earlier order. Both High Court orders were before the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile the appointments went ahead on the strength of the Act. Of the 362 candidates selected, 46 had been found tainted. Appointments were given to 191 candidates, 14 of them tainted. The individual who had filed the writ petition took a special leave petition to the Supreme Court but did not pursue it properly, and it was rejected, leaving open the contentions of the present appellants, whose petitions were entertained.
The State concedes, the appointees plead equity
Shyam Divan, senior counsel for the appellants, argued that the Act of 2022 effectively nullified the Supreme Court’s decision, which is contrary to the accepted principle of validation. A validating law is permissible only where an apparent error or defect noticed by a constitutional court is removed by subsequent legislation, so that actions taken under the legislation can be validated. The legislature cannot sit in appeal over a decision of the High Court or the Supreme Court, and a host of decisions were cited for the proposition.
Kapil Sibal, for the State, candidly submitted that the legislation could not be supported. That left the successful candidates to defend it. C.A. Sundram and Anand Sanjay M. Nuli, senior counsel, with the advocates-on-record for the appointees, made what the bench described as a feeble attempt to sustain the legislation, and a vigorous one to canvass the appointees’ case on grounds of equity.
A stillborn law cannot found an equity
The bench found nothing left to examine in support of the recruitment. Having gone through the decisions of the High Court and the Supreme Court in both earlier rounds, it held that the 2011 selection had been set aside not merely for a defect or irregularity in the process but because rampant corruption and blatant nepotism had vitiated the entire selection. There could be no equity in favour of the selected candidates, whose selection rested on a recruitment the constitutional courts had declared tainted and whose appointments were made under what the bench called a stillborn legislation.
The Court treated Medical Council of India v. State of Kerala, (2019) 13 SCC 185, as an identical situation. There, admissions to two medical colleges in Kerala for 2016-17 had been found illegal by the Admission Supervisory Committee, a finding upheld by the Kerala High Court and the Supreme Court. The State then promulgated an ordinance regularising the admissions of 180 students who had been illegally admitted, citing the hardship to the students. Karnataka’s stated intention in the Act of 2022, the bench noted, was the same: relieving hardship to the selected candidates.
The bench then read the Act itself, Act No. 22, with its Statement of Objects and Reasons. After narrating the facts from the start of the recruitment, the statement notices the Tribunal’s order at the first instance quashing the cancellation and directing appointments. It states that the candidates were not responsible and that none of them was arrayed as an accused; only the Chairman, members and staff of the KPSC and some middlemen were arraigned in the CID’s chargesheet. On that footing, and invoking the rule in Taylor v. Taylor, (1875) 1 Ch.D 426, that a thing prescribed to be done in a particular manner must be done in that manner or not at all, the legislation set aside the annulment of the recruitment. The bench found the statement said nothing about any irregular manner in which the cancellation had been carried out. In any event, with the cancellation upheld by the High Court and the Supreme Court, the legislature had no power to annul it, even by legislation, and so nullify the judgments of the constitutional courts. The lofty ideal of providing justice to the 2011 batch of Gazetted Probationers fell flat, the bench said, because the recruitment itself had been found tainted with corruption and nepotism by the High Court, a finding the Supreme Court upheld in a civil appeal.
What a legislature may validate, and what it may not
From the authorities relied on in Medical Council of India, the bench drew out three. In Janapada Sabha, Chhindwara v. The Central Provinces Syndicate Ltd., (1970) 1 SCC 509, the Court held that it is not open to the legislature to render a judgment ineffective, though it may, within limits, amend an enactment retrospectively, declare that the law shall be deemed always to have been as subsequently enacted, and validate action taken under it notwithstanding a decision that invalidated the enactment, provided the defect found by the court stands removed by the later legislation.
The Constitution Bench in In re: Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, 1993 Supp (1) SCC 96, cautioned that if the exercise of judicial review could be set at naught by a State government or legislature overriding a decision given against it, that would sound the death knell of the rule of law. The legislature may change the law in general by changing its very basis, the bench recorded, but it may not set aside an individual decision between parties that affects their rights and liabilities. That, the bench said, was exactly the exercise Karnataka attempted in enacting the Act of 2022.
And in S.T. Sadiq v. State of Kerala and Ors., (2015) 4 SCC 400, the Court laid down that the legislative function consists of making law, not declaring what the law shall be. A legislature making a law retrospectively and validating it notwithstanding a court’s decision may alter the very basis of the earlier decision, but it cannot directly annul a final judgment by subsequent legislation; such an Act would be declared unconstitutional. The bench said it had no doubt in its mind that the Act of 2022 was unconstitutional.
Surprise and alarm at the High Court orders
The bench set aside the Act and both impugned judgments, in the PIL and in the writ petition against the Tribunal’s refusal of interim relief. Although the individual who filed the PIL had not pursued it, the PIL stood allowed, with the appellants transposed as petitioners. In a PIL, the bench explained, the petitioner’s role is minimal, especially where it is not prosecuted properly and the constitutional court finds substance in the challenge; the court examines the matter on accepted principles of law regardless of the petitioner’s participation. A public interest litigant cannot withdraw the petition on the principle of dominus litis without the court’s leave. What the record disclosed here, the bench said, was an attempt by an unconnected individual to stultify a valid challenge to the notification.
The bench recorded “a little bit of surprise and a lot more alarm” at the impugned judgments. The PIL had been dealt with cursorily and the later writ petition in a similar manner, “throwing to winds every tenet of law”, upholding an enactment clearly beyond the powers conferred on the law-making authority and bordering on the absurd.
No reprieve for the untainted appointees
The selected candidates whom the CID had not found tainted made a fervent plea in their written submissions not to disturb their appointments. Their first argument was that the CID prosecution arrayed only members of the KPSC, and none of the candidates, in the FIR or the chargesheet, and that the High Court had since set aside the Special Court’s cognizance. The bench was not convinced that a prosecution which had not ended in a trial could in any way allow the continuation of appointments that rested on the legislation under challenge. The intervenors also argued that in the earlier round the State had defended the cancellation, so retention of untainted candidates could not then have been raised, and that the State had now changed its stance, as the legislation showed. That shifting of stance with the changing times, the bench said, was what it had criticised at the outset. With the entire selection cancelled, there was no scope now to entertain a plea to segregate tainted from untainted candidates on the basis of a CID report. And the appointments existed only by virtue of a law the Court had found unconstitutional.
Order
The Act of 2022 is set aside as unconstitutional, along with the High Court’s orders of 21 April 2022 in the writ petition and 23 August 2022 in the appeal against the Tribunal’s refusal of interim relief. The appointments made pursuant to the tainted recruitment will come to an end. Because a decade and a half has passed since the recruitment began, the bench declined to resume the selection from the stage after the preliminary examination, where it was found tainted. Instead, the State government is directed to notify recruitment for the Group A and B posts now vacant, under the recruitment rules presently in force. The appointed candidates not found tainted, the six appellants, and the petitioners before the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal are to be granted age relaxation as a one-time opportunity to appear in that recruitment, alongside other eligible candidates. Anyone selected takes seniority only from the date of appointment, with no back wages or notional appointment from an earlier date. Those presently in service who are selected will likewise rank from their fresh appointment, but their service under the earlier appointment will count towards pension and retirement benefits. The appeals are allowed. The interlocutory applications for impleadment and the prayers for intervention are rejected.