Gurugram: The Supreme Court Wednesday stayed the Punjab and Haryana High Court’s 4 February order that quashed the chargesheet against eight Haryana Civil Services officers facing allegations of cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy in their original recruitment in 2002.
A bench of justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta issued a notice to the state of Haryana government and others, returnable within four weeks. In the meantime, the SC directed, the effect and operation of the High Court’s order shall remain stayed.
The Special Leave Petition has been filed by senior Congress leader Karan Singh Dalal, a former Palwal MLA and ex-minister, who has been at the centre of the litigation around this controversy for nearly a quarter century.
Senior Advocate R. Basant appeared for Dalal before the Supreme Court bench.
The Supreme Court’s stay means the eight officers — Jagdeep Dhanda, Sarita Malik, Kamlesh Bhadoo, Kuldhir Singh, Vatsal Vashisht, Jag Niwas, Veena Hooda, and Surender Singh-I — who were provisionally promoted to the IAS, face fresh uncertainty over their elevation.
The Union Department of Personnel and Training had issued a notification for their promotion subject to the outcome of Dalal’s original petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court against the 2002 HCS recruitment, with the provisionally considered officers required to get the cases against them quashed within a specific time frame.
The High Court had quashed the charge sheet against them in February, but that order is now under a cloud.
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A saga of two decades
The roots of this controversy go back to the INLD government of Om Prakash Chautala.
The eight petitioners in the HC were among 64 candidates announced selected by the Haryana Public Service Commission.on 4 September 2002, for various posts in the Haryana Civil Services and Allied Services.
They joined service in 2002 and continued to serve, earning selection grades. Even before the results were announced, a writ petition was filed on 31 July 2002, by then MLA Karan Singh Dalal, alleging nepotism and irregularities in the recruitment process.
After the Congress came to power in 2005 under Bhupinder Singh Hooda, it pursued the case.
Former IAS officer P. Raghavendra Rao filed an affidavit in the HC in 2009 providing detailed insights into the allegations, revealing alleged significant irregularities, including alleged answer sheet manipulations, marks tampering, and favouritism during interviews.
A police complaint by a Jalandhar resident, who had applied but was not selected, led to an FIR being registered by the State Vigilance Bureau in October 2005, but crucially, the eight HCS officers were not named in that FIR.
That is precisely where the High Court found the chargesheet legally untenable.
In the February 2026 ruling, Justice Jasgurpreet Singh Puri ruled that the officers were neither named in the FIR nor investigated, and their names were incorporated after 18 years without any probe.
The FIR of 18 October 2005 pertained to selections of assistant professors by the Haryana Public Service Commission, an entirely different selection process.
After 18 years, in 2023, the police presented a report under Section 173 CrPC on 30 June 2023, incorporating the names of the petitioners but without conducting any investigation against them.
The officers’ counsel, senior advocates Gurminder Singh and PS Ahluwalia, had argued before the HC that the petitioners were named in the charge sheet due to “mala fide reasons best known to the respondent-state in order to jeopardise their consideration for selection to the post of IAS after having been nominated by the state government in the panel sent to the UPSC.”
The IAS promotion tangle
What made this case particularly contentious was the simultaneous push by the Haryana government to promote these very officers to the IAS, even as the charge sheet hung over them.
The UPSC had returned Haryana’s promotion proposals multiple times due to the pending charge sheet. In May 2025, the UPSC had returned the state government’s proposal to promote 27 state service officers to IAS, citing the charge sheet against the eight 2002-batch officers.
The state eventually prevailed. The provisional promotions of the officers stirred debate, fuelled by objections from Dalal, who wrote to President Droupadi Murmu alleging “substantial prima facie evidence of corruption” in the 2001 HCS examination that selected the 2002 batch.
He accused the Haryana government of ignoring legal advice against issuing integrity certificates, a prerequisite for IAS promotion, and of shielding the officers under political pressure.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)