Chandigarh, April 21
A three-judge committee appointed by the then acting Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Mr Justice H.S. Bedi, to segregate "tainted from non-tainted" members of the Punjab Civil Service (judicial) selected by the Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC) headed by the controversial Ravinder Pal Sidhu, alias Ravi Sidhu, is not unanimous on its recommendations.
Mr Justice K.S. Grewal, who headed the committee, has differed from the report of the two other members, Mr Justice Ashutosh Mohanta and Mr Justice Jasbir Singh.
The committee was set up on May 25, 2006, on the directions of the Supreme Court.
A similar committee was set up under the chairmanship of
Mr Justice J.S. Kehar, with Mr Justice Vinay Mittal and Mr Justice Surya Kant Sharma as its members, to segregate the tainted from the non-tainted in the Punjab Civil Service (executive branch) selected during Ravi Sidhu’s tenure as the PPSC chief.
While the committee on the PCS(EB) has unanimously recommended the quashing of the entire selection, the committee on the PCS(J) has failed to reach a unanimous conclusion.
In his 32-page report Mr Justice Grewal has concluded that no individual candidate can be considered to be tainted on the basis of either the scrutiny of the answersheets by the examiners appointed by the judges’ committee or on the basis of the police investigation into the cases against Ravi Sidhu “as no candidate has been prosecuted by the Vigilance Department”.
However, Mr Justice Grewal held that at best only eight candidates could be termed tainted on the basis of the statements of two approvers. The judge identified these eight candidates as Maninder Singh (1999 batch), and Ram Saran, Preetwinder Singh, Mandeep Kaur, Monika Sethi, Navdeep Singh, Rajinder Bansal and Anil Jindal, all of the 2001 batch.
The other two members of the committee, Mr Justice Mohanta and Mr Justice Jasbir Singh, in a joint 62-page report said since it was not possible to segregate the tainted from the non-tainted, “the entire process of selection deserves to be set aside.” The judges said in view of the material supplied by the investigating agency to the committee, “we arrive at only one conclusion that the entire process of selection was nothing but a fraud upon the deserving candidates and the system.”
The committee members differed not only in their conclusions, but Mr Justice Grewal also added a postscript (PS) to his report. In the PS he said that he had placed a draft of his report before the committee in early December, 2006, after which the proceedings were concluded. “However, the joint report of my learned brothers refers to certain earlier judicial proceedings between the Chairman (Ravi Sidhu) and the members of the PPSC. This record was summoned by them after the proceedings were concluded, but was never discussed before the committee.”
Mr Justice Grewal said: “I do not think it is at all relevant to the terms of reference of the committee. I also feel that my learned brothers have placed far too much emphasis on the wealth of Ravi Sidhu. I fail to see how this helps to identify the tainted candidates.”
All three members of the committee were, however, unanimous about the shoddy way in which the examiners of the PPSC had evaluated the answersheets. The judges were astounded that the examiners either gave marks for wrong answers or gave lower marks for correct answers. The pattern was almost uniform for the so-called tainted or untainted candidates.
