The Jharkhand High Court has observed that the state cannot remove candidates who are already appointed through a notification alone without following natural justice, and that all the appointments cannot be treated as wrong together, while the state argues that cancelling about 2,700 appointments was warranted by alleged irregularities.
Natural justice sounds abstract, but it is a concrete procedural demand: before the state takes away a job that someone already holds, it must tell them the case against them and let them respond.
That principle explains the shape of the dispute. The state’s argument is about the size of the problem, meaning alleged malpractice across a recruitment process. The court’s concern is the method, meaning a single blanket notification applied to thousands of individuals with very different circumstances.
It also explains the court’s careful distinction between a process that had lapses and a person who is personally guilty. A flawed process can be a reason to investigate, but it does not by itself show that every appointee did anything wrong.
The practical reading for anyone following the case is that the eventual outcome may turn less on whether irregularities occurred and more on whether the state can separate the tainted appointments from the untainted ones through a process that hears each side.
Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora and the Advocate General represented the state, and JPSC was represented by its own counsel.
Senior advocate Rajiv Ranjan, a former Advocate General of Jharkhand, appeared for the candidates along with several other advocates.
The petitioners were given time to file counter-affidavits, which the court has allowed within 10 days of receiving copies of the notices.
The next hearing has been fixed for October 7, 2026, at 11:30 am.
The court also appointed retired High Court judge Gautam Kumar Chaudhary to monitor the SIT investigation and hear candidates’ grievances.
High Court of Jharkhand, Ranchi, Wikimedia Commons, CC0