Written by: Shubham Kumar6 min readAug 24, 2026 04:21 PM IST First published on: Aug 24, 2026 at 04:21 PM IST“The government should be held to a high standard of rectangular rectitude while dealing with its citizens,” the Supreme Court observed in Motilal Padampat Sugar Mills. The phrase belongs to another era, but the constitutional instinct behind it is remarkably contemporary. When the state speaks through a formal decision, citizens are entitled to assume that its word means something. Few governmental acts are more consequential than an appointment letter. It tells an aspirant that the uncertainty of an examination is over, that she has crossed into public service, and that she may now arrange her life accordingly. If the same state later seeks to undo that appointment, the issue is no longer merely whether something went wrong in an examination. The harder question is whether everyone can be made to pay for a wrong that has not yet been shown to be theirs.That is the difficulty with the Hemant Soren government’s decision to cancel a wide set of recruitment examinations in Jharkhand, including the 11th to 13th Combined Civil Services Examination conducted by the JPSC. The decision followed sustained protests over alleged irregularities in public recruitment. Those concerns deserved a serious governmental response. But in the case of the JPSC examination, hundreds of candidates had already been appointed and had begun serving the state. The Jharkhand High Court subsequently stayed the cancellation of these appointments and called upon the government to justify its action. The interim order does not certify the recruitment as clean. What it does is expose the central administrative law problem in the government’s approach: It appears to have chosen the most drastic remedy before demonstrating why anything narrower would fail.AdvertisementThere is nothing legally objectionable about cancelling a recruitment that has been fundamentally corrupted. A paper leak of sufficient scale, systematic manipulation of marks, collusion within an examination agency or a process so compromised that genuine merit can no longer be identified may leave the state with little choice. Public employment under Articles 14 and 16 must be distributed through a process that commands confidence, not merely one that produces a final list.Also Read | What the young want, and why creating good jobs is no longer optionalBut “irregularity” cannot become a magic word that does all the legal work. Manipulation of an interview board, malpractice involving identifiable candidates, failure by an outsourced agency and contamination of the entire examination are not the same wrong. Administrative law requires the government to identify the defect and connect the remedy to it. That is the essence of proportionality: The state must ask not only whether it has a legitimate objective, but whether the measure chosen is necessary to achieve it and whether a less destructive alternative is reasonably available.The Supreme Court has recognised that wholesale cancellation may be justified where tainted candidates cannot realistically be separated from the untainted. But the converse is equally important. If those who benefited from malpractice can be identified, treating every successful candidate alike converts administrative correction into collective punishment. The state cannot avoid the difficult work of differentiation merely because cancelling everything is simpler. Suspicion may justify an inquiry. It does not, by itself, justify imposing the maximum civil consequence upon everyone connected with the process.AdvertisementThe state may rely on the settled principle in Shankarsan Dash v Union of India that inclusion in a select list does not create an indefeasible right to appointment. But that proposition addresses a person waiting to be appointed. It cannot answer every dispute after the government has already issued the appointment order, accepted joining, assigned responsibilities and taken the benefit of the appointee’s service.The Supreme Court’s decision in Radhey Shyam Yadav v State of Uttar Pradesh is important precisely because it notices this temporal distinction. While distinguishing cases in which recruitment was cancelled before appointments were made, the Court observed that in those cases “no rights were crystallised”. Once appointment and service intervene, the legal situation changes. An appointment may still be cancelled for established illegality or fraud, but the state’s burden of justification is considerably heavier.Proper administration ordinarily moves from allegation to inquiry, from inquiry to finding, and from finding to consequence. When the consequence comes first, and the precise extent of wrongdoing is left for subsequent investigation, the burden is effectively reversed. Everyone loses the benefit of appointment first; innocence can be sorted out later.That approach also raises a natural justice question. Once individuals are already serving, cancellation affects an existing legal status and livelihood. They are no longer anonymous entries in an examination database. If the state proposes to take away that status because of misconduct attributable to particular persons or stages of recruitment, fairness requires a far more exact account of why the individual appointee must suffer.The High Court’s stay is significant in this limited sense. It does not prevent investigation or protect anyone ultimately shown to have benefited from fraud. It merely restores the sequence that public law ordinarily expects: Establish the basis for extinguishing an accomplished appointment before allowing it to become irreversible.There is also a larger institutional lesson in the Jharkhand controversy. Protests are an essential democratic instrument. They can reveal institutional failure, force an indifferent government to investigate, and put neglected questions of public accountability back on the agenda. But political pressure cannot itself become evidence against another citizen. A crowd outside the Secretariat may properly trigger scrutiny; it cannot substitute for the state’s obligation to determine who actually did what.you may likeHemant Soren’s government was right to confront allegations surrounding Jharkhand’s recruitment machinery. Its apparent error was to equate a clean-up with a reset. If particular candidates benefited from manipulation, identify them and proceed against them. If one stage of an examination was compromised, establish its effect on the final selection. If the entire process was irretrievably contaminated, place the evidence on record and explain why segregation was impossible.Constitutional government is often less dramatic than political government because it requires precision when outrage demands speed. The rule of law does not prevent the state from using an axe where an institution is rotten to its roots. It first requires the state to show that it looked for the rot before cutting down the entire tree.The writer is a constitutional lawyer and public policy consultant