A Law That Cured Nothing: Why Karnataka Could Not Legislate Away a Corrupt Recruitment

A Legislature Can Change the Law. It Cannot Change the Facts.

A legislature in India has wide power to make laws, including laws that apply retrospectively. It may even pass a validating Act that rescues an action a court has struck down. But the Supreme Court has set one firm limit: the law must cure the defect the court identified.

It cannot simply declare that the court's finding no longer counts. Karnataka's 2022 Act failed that test, because the defect in the 2011 recruitment was not a legal flaw that could be cured. It was corruption that had been proved.

The

Rule as Written: What a Validating Act May Do The principle runs through a line of judgments, from Madan Mohan Pathak (1978) to the Cauvery Water Disputes reference (1991). A legislature may change the legal basis on which a judgment rests, for instance by amending a rule the court found missing or invalid.

If the new law genuinely alters that basis, the old judgment no longer applies. What a legislature may not do is overrule a judgment by declaring the opposite of what the court found. The difference is between fixing the law and overruling the judge.

A validating Act can repair a gap in the rules. It cannot erase a finding of fact.

The

Rule as Practised: A Law That Cured Nothing The 2011 KPSC recruitment was for 362 Group A and Group B posts, drawing about 1,38,307 applicants. Two years later, a CID inquiry found gross manipulation, including serious irregularities in how answer scripts were evaluated.

The State cancelled the recruitment in 2014. The Karnataka High Court upheld the cancellation and the Supreme Court affirmed it. The 2022 Act then sought to validate the same selection. There was no missing rule to supply and no technical defect to repair.

The flaw was the fraud itself and no statute can declare a corrupt process clean. The Court held that the Act was passed to override the earlier judgments, which a legislature has no power to do. It also tied the case to Article 16, which guarantees equal opportunity in public employment: validating a tainted selection denies that opportunity to every honest applicant.

Who Paid for the Flip-Flops

The second strand of the ruling is about cost. Over a decade, the State moved from backing the cancellation to legislating to undo it and candidates were caught in between. Six appellants had pursued the case for so long that they were now over the age limit.

The Court accepted that, after nearly fifteen years, it could not restart the old process from the point where the taint began, after the preliminary examination. It ordered fresh recruitment instead, with a one-time age relaxation covering the six appellants, petitioners before the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal and other eligible candidates.

The West Bengal School Service Commission case offers a contrast. On 3 April 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the cancellation of 25,753 appointments from the 2016 process and no legislature attempted a rescue there. In both cases the courts concluded that when taint cannot be separated cleanly from merit, the whole process falls and honest candidates share the loss.

Why This Matters for the Exam Separation of

powers in India is not a wall but a division of functions. The Karnataka ruling marks one of its clearest edges: the legislature controls the law, but only courts decide what happened under it. A validating Act that ignores this is not law-making but adjudication by another name.