SC dismisses State plea in compulsory retirement case

Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Dec 5: Supreme Court has dismissed the Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed by State Government against the directions of the Division Bench of the J&K High Court in a compulsory retirement case.
State Government in the month of June 2015 had prematurely retired 63 Government employees by invoking Article 226(2) of CSR on the recommendation of a high powered review committee headed by the then Chief Secretary.
Almost all the prematurely retired employees challenged this order in the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir. Most of these orders were quashed by the State High Court and the Government was directed to reinstate the petitioners with all consequential benefits.
Javed Iqbal Shah, AEE, was among one of those employees whose orders were quashed by Justice Alok Aradhe. The State Government filed LPA, which was dismissed by the Division Bench on April 18, 2017. The State Government instead of implementing the orders passed by the High Court filed a SLP titled State of Jammu and Kashmir Versus Javed Iqbal before the Supreme Court, which was taken up for hearing before Justice Kurian Joseph and Justice Deepak Gupta.
During the course of hearing, the counsel for State Government sought permission to withdraw this Special Leave Petition (SLP). Accordingly, permission was granted and the SLP was dismissed as withdrawn. However, it was made clear to the State Government to complete the direction passed by Single Judge within 8 weeks.
The Single Judge as well as the Division Bench had observed that the service record of the employees has not been considered by the review committee and mere involvement of the employees in a criminal case has been taken as ground to take the decision to throw them out of the service which is against the settled law of the land.

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