When the examiner becomes the cheat: Why Raj HC refused to save SI-2021 exam

Jaipur: On April 4, 2026, a Division Bench of the Rajasthan High Court — comprising Acting Chief Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma and Justice Sangeeta Sharma — dismissed a battery of seventeen special appeals and upheld a Single Judge’s earlier order cancelling the Rajasthan Public Service Commission’s Sub-Inspector and Platoon Commander Recruitment Examination 2021. The State of Rajasthan, the RPSC, selected candidates who stood to lose their jobs, and even the officer who was an RPSC Member herself — all challenged that cancellation. All of them lost.

This is not a routine service matter. It is a story about what happens when the people who guard the gate are the ones who open it for the wrong reasons.

The Story So Far: A Three-Year Journey to Cancellation

In February 2021, the RPSC advertised 859 posts of Sub-Inspector and Platoon Commander. Nearly eight lakh candidates applied. The written examination was held across September 13 to 15, 2021, in what the RPSC described as a Covid-era necessity — spreading 3.83 lakh candidates across three days in socially distanced halls.

By June 2023, 3,064 candidates had cleared all three stages — written exam, physical efficiency test, and interview. Appointment orders flowed in batches: 780 on September 21, 2023, 19 more in October, 86 in February 2024, and 2 more in March 2024. For those candidates, their dream of becoming a police officer appeared finally, solidly real.

Then the arrests began.

In August 2024, the children of RPSC Member Ramuram Raika were arrested. Raika himself was arrested a day later. Another RPSC member, Babulal Katara, was arrested shortly after. The Special Operations Group (SOG) of the Rajasthan Police had been quietly investigating, and what it found was grim: organized gangs, leaked papers circulated on social media, dummy candidates, Bluetooth devices — and at the centre of it all, the very officials appointed under the Constitution to ensure the examination’s integrity.

By the time the Single Judge of the High Court passed his order on August 28, 2025, directing cancellation of the entire recruitment process, the State Government had itself been torn. Its Advocate General had initially recommended cancellation. A Cabinet sub-committee had twice reconsidered and eventually concluded that full cancellation was “premature.” The State ultimately chose to protect the selection and only terminate the “tainted” candidates it could identify — 47 of whom had already lost their jobs.

The Single Judge disagreed with the State and ordered cancellation anyway. The State, the RPSC, and the selected candidates all rushed to the Division Bench. On April 4, 2026, the Division Bench sent them back, empty-handed.

Six Questions the Court Had to Answer

The Division Bench was admirably clear about what it was deciding. It identified six specific questions before proceeding to answer each. Was the second petition maintainable at all — given that an earlier petition had been withdrawn? Did the petitioners suppress material facts? Did they use illegally obtained documents? Was there a valid prayer to challenge the State’s decision not to cancel? Was the State Government’s own decision — to protect the clean candidates — legally defensible? And finally, was the scale of malpractice enough to call this a “systemic” failure warranting full cancellation? All six were answered against the appellants.

5 Reasons the HC Upheld Cancellation

Reason 1: The Gatekeepers Were the Cheaters — and That Changes Everything

The most damning fact in this entire case is deceptively simple: two members of the RPSC — the constitutional body entrusted under Article 315 of the Constitution to conduct the examination — were themselves found to have leaked the paper. Babulal Katara and Ramuram Raika were not rogue invigilators hired from a private school. They were RPSC Members. Raika’s own children were among those arrested. The Court noted that Katara, despite already being connected to paper leakage in a different RPSC examination, was still permitted to sit on the interview panel for this one. The Court’s observation: the Chairman’s “role apparently seems to be dubious when he allows that Member of the RPSC to participate in the interview in spite of having known of the same Member being already involved in paper leakage relating to another examination.”

The Court held that when those responsible for conducting the examination are the ones who compromise it, the contamination is not peripheral — it goes to the very root of the process. The Members of the RPSC are “jointly and severally liable” for their conduct. The examination was “reduced to a farce.” This is why the State’s primary defence — that only 10% of selected candidates were actually arrested — did not move the Court. The taint was not in the candidates; it was in the institution that assessed them.

Reason 2: Segregation Was a Promise the System Could Not Keep

The State’s most practically compelling argument was: why punish the 90% for the 10%? The State said its SOG had identified the tainted candidates, terminated 47 of them, and was continuing to weed out bad actors. The Court answered with numbers and logic. By the time the Division Bench pronounced its judgment, 138 persons had been arrested, 133 had been charge-sheeted — but 85 accused were still absconding. Investigation under Section 173(8) CrPC remained pending against 89 accused, including trainee Sub-Inspectors still in training. More than two years after the examination, not a single meaningful segregation had been completed.

More fundamentally, the paper was leaked onto social media on the day of the examination itself. The Kaler gang circulated it on September 13, 2021. The Jagdish gang circulated it through site-handlers across Rajasthan. Once a paper is on WhatsApp, the Court observed, quoting the Supreme Court in Vanshika Yadav v. Union of India: “Once shared through social media, it is exceedingly difficult to trace the journey of a post or message or document.” The SOG’s own first report — dated August 13, 2024 — had explicitly stated that segregation was impossible. A later report softened that conclusion, but by then two-plus years had passed with no segregation achieved. The Court concluded the contamination was “deep-rooted and incapable of being surgically isolated.”

Reason 3: The Procedural Failures Were Not Accidental — They Were Structural

The appellants argued that lapses in exam conduct — private schools used as centres, no jammers, no biometric verification — were routine COVID-era adjustments, not systemic failure. The Court rejected this framing. The Division Bench compiled a catalogue of what actually went wrong: no internet shutdown at centres, no biometric or fingerprint verification, no jammers, no effective videography (records withheld from SOG investigators despite specific requests), admit cards with unclear photographs making impersonation easy, and examination centres permitted beyond the RPSC’s own circular at Alwar, Pali, Bhilwara and Rajsamand with unmonitored private invigilators.

Then there was the normalisation process. Conducted over three days with different paper sets, scores had to be normalised for equivalence. The RPSC conducted that normalisation illegally — and when asked under the RTI Act, withheld the details. The Court enumerated this as a specific lapse: a process affecting every candidate’s final score, conducted improperly and then concealed. These were not accidents. They represented a systematic abdication of the security obligations a constitutional examination body carries.

Reason 4: The State Cannot Take Refuge in Its Own Indecision

The State made a sophisticated procedural argument: it had taken a decision — after extensive Cabinet sub-committee deliberation — not to cancel the examination. That decision, the Advocate General argued, was never specifically challenged in the writ petitions. The Single Judge had no business overturning an executive decision not formally the subject of the case. The Division Bench was not persuaded.

The Court noted that the State’s “decision” emerged from a tortuous internal process: the Advocate General had himself recommended cancellation in September 2024, the sub-committee met twice, sent recommendations to the Chief Minister, had them returned, reconsidered, and finally concluded against cancellation in June 2025 — just weeks before the Single Judge reserved judgment. When the institutional conduct of the examining body has itself been found to be compromised, the Court held, the executive’s choice to protect the selection cannot insulate that compromised process from judicial scrutiny under Article 226 of the Constitution.

Reason 5: The Technical Objections Were Real, But They Didn’t Change the Facts

The appellants raised three procedural objections to maintainability — all taken seriously, all rejected.

On suppression: Petitioner Kailash Chand Sharma had filed an earlier writ petition in 2022, withdrawn it without liberty to refile, and did not disclose this in his second petition. The Court held suppression must relate to facts with “a direct and substantive bearing on the merits.” The 2022 withdrawal — before any appointments and before the arrests — did not dilute the core question of systemic compromise. Technical non-disclosure cannot shut the door on genuine public interest.

On the leaked SOG report: One petitioner was a constable posted in the SOG who obtained the internal report recommending cancellation. The appellants said this was illegally obtained confidential material to be excluded. The Court applied the principle from Yashwant Sinha v. CBI: the test for admissibility is relevance, not mode of procurement. A report going to “the very root of the controversy” cannot be excluded on technicalities.

On res judicata: A petition dismissed as “withdrawn” carries no adjudication on the merits. The Supreme Court’s precedent in Daryao v. State of U.P. settles this: such dismissal cannot bar a subsequent petition.

What the Court Actually Ordered

The Division Bench dismissed all seventeen special appeals and upheld the Single Judge’s cancellation of the Sub-Inspector Recruitment Examination 2021, including its result, recommendations, and appointments. The directions of the Single Judge — cancellation of appointments, reinstatement of those who resigned from earlier government service to join as Sub-Inspectors, and requirement of sufficient posts with age relaxation in future recruitment — are now to be implemented. The suo motu PIL was separately dismissed as a PIL does not lie in service matters.

The Division Bench went beyond the case to address a structural problem. RPSC Members, the Court observed, are selected “at the whims and fancies of the Government in power without examining their integrity.” The Court referenced similar institutional collapses in Telangana (TSPSC) and Uttarakhand (UKSSSC), noting that in all these cases the paper leaked from within — from the very people entrusted with its security. The legislature, the Court said, needs to lay down guiding principles for PSC Member selection, ensure persons with “the highest integrity” are appointed, and the SOG must investigate how the leakage occurred within RPSC itself — since a single person cannot accomplish this alone.

The judgment acknowledges honestly that approximately 740 selected Sub-Inspectors face no allegations. Some passed other competitive exams. Twenty-five young candidates passed in their very first attempt. The Court does not pretend this cancellation imposes no cost. But the legal principle it applies is a hard one: when the process itself is corrupt, the result cannot be protected — because the Court cannot be certain any individual result is untainted. The innocent, in such cases, suffer for the guilty. That is the tragedy at the heart of this judgment, and the Court does not shy away from it. What it offers instead is a guarantee: when fresh recruitment happens, those who lost three years to this fraud will not also lose their window — age bars will be relaxed, seats will be sufficient, and the next examination will be conducted with the integrity this one so conspicuously lacked.

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