A legislature can change the law, not the verdict: SC strikes down Karnataka's Act reviving the tainted 2011 KPSC batch

On 3 November 2011 Karnataka advertised 362 Group A and B posts. More than 1.38 lakh candidates applied, 6,211 reached the mains and 1,090 were interviewed. The final list was never published. A CID inquiry found what the Supreme Court later called rampant corruption and blatant nepotism in the Karnataka Public Service Commission, and the State cancelled the whole selection in 2014. The High Court and the Supreme Court upheld that cancellation. Then, in 2022, the State Legislature passed an Act declaring the selection valid. On 29 October 2026 the Supreme Court struck that Act down.

The ruling is non-reportable and short, but it is a model answer to one of the most tested questions in constitutional law: when may a legislature "validate" something a court has struck down, and when is it simply overruling the court?

A recruitment the courts had already buried twice

The Act came at the end of a long run of litigation, and that history decided the case.

The record before the Court in Avinash C. was damning. It included call records between candidates and Commission members, identical interview marks given to at least 566 candidates, and the replacement of the digital video recorder in the KPSC building. That Court refused to separate "tainted" from "untainted" candidates because the process itself was tainted. Under the 2022 Act, 191 appointments were made, 14 of them of candidates the CID had flagged.

The State's own senior counsel told the Court the Act "cannot at all be supported".

That concession, recorded in the judgment, left the selected candidates to defend the law on equity. The Court gave that argument short shrift. There can be no equity in a selection that the constitutional courts have found tainted, and appointments resting on what it called a "stillborn legislation".

What a validating Act may do, and what it may not

The Court rested on four decisions, and together they give the test:

• Janapada Sabha, Chhindwara v. Central Provinces Syndicate, (1970) 1 SCC 509. A legislature cannot render a judgment ineffective. It may amend the law retrospectively and declare that the law shall be deemed always to have been as amended, which validates action taken under it, notwithstanding a decision that relied on the defect now removed.
• In re Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, 1993 Supp (1) SCC 96. If a State can override a judicial decision given against it, that sounds the death knell of the rule of law. A legislature may change the law generally by altering its basis, but it cannot set aside an individual decision between the parties.
• S.T. Sadiq v. State of Kerala, (2015) 4 SCC 400. Legislative power is the power to make law, not to declare what the law is. A retrospective law may remove the basis of a judgment, but a law that directly annuls a final judgment is unconstitutional.
• Medical Council of India v. State of Kerala, (2019) 13 SCC 185. The closest parallel. After the courts upheld the finding that 180 admissions to two private medical colleges were illegal, Kerala issued an Ordinance "regularising" them to relieve the students' hardship. It was struck down, and the Karnataka Act claimed the same motive.

The standard Constitution commentary sets out the same doctrine in the context of tax validation, and it reads as a checklist:

Apply that table to the Karnataka Act. The courts had not cancelled the selection because of a defect in a statute or rule that the legislature could correct. They upheld its cancellation because the process was corrupt. No retrospective amendment can make a corrupt evaluation honest. With no basis to remove, the Act could only do the forbidden thing: declare the opposite of what the courts had held, for the same people on the same facts.

The Statement of Objects and Reasons shows this. It said that no candidate had been charge-sheeted and invoked the rule in Taylor v. Taylor that a thing required to be done in a particular manner must be done in that manner or not at all. The suggestion was that the cancellation had been improperly made. The Court noted that the Act identified no irregularity in how the cancellation was made, and in any event that cancellation had been upheld by the High Court and the Supreme Court. Citing a rule of procedure could not undo findings of fraud.

The Public Service Commission angle

The High Court's first-round finding, recorded again here, called the evaluation scandal a blow to confidence in the Public Service Commission, a constitutional body created by Part XIV (Articles 315 to 323) to insulate recruitment from patronage. That is why the case belongs in a services-law answer as well as a separation-of-powers answer. A validating law for a corrupt PSC selection does more than override a judgment. It undoes the constitutional reason for having an independent Commission at all.

The candidates' best equitable argument was that most of them were never accused of anything. The Court's answer follows Avinash C.: where the whole process is vitiated, there is no clean list to save, and the CID report could not now be used to sort the selected into tainted and untainted. Students should note the reasoning without overstating it. Where a selection is only partly affected and the untainted can be separated, courts have sometimes saved them. This was not such a case, as two rounds of litigation had found.

How the Court moulded relief after fifteen years

Striking down the Act ended the appointments made under it, but the Court did not order the 2011 process to restart. Fifteen years on, it directed:

• a fresh recruitment for the vacant Group A and B posts under the rules now in force;
• a one-time age relaxation for the appointees not found tainted, the six appellants, and the petitioners still before the Tribunal;
• seniority only from the date of any fresh appointment, with no back wages and no notional appointment from an earlier date;
• for serving appointees who are selected again, their earlier service counts towards pension and retirement benefits.

One procedural point is worth a line in any PIL answer. The original challenge to the Act had been filed as a PIL by an individual who then did not pursue it. The Court allowed the PIL anyway, substituting the appellants as petitioners. A public interest litigant cannot withdraw on the principle of dominus litis without the court's leave, and once the court finds substance in the challenge it examines it on principle, whatever the petitioner does. The Court also noted, with what it called "a lot more alarm", how briefly the High Court had disposed of both the PIL and the writ petition.

MCQs on validating legislation