Government must now govern by applying the law first
The October 31 quashing of appointments of Nagaland Police Sub Inspectors (SIs), Assistant Sis and other personnel is another clear judicial affirmation that recruitment without public advertisement is not a minor procedural lapse but outright illegal. The Division Bench of the Gauhati High Court at Kohima, basically, did not entertain pleas of urgency or operational need and declared that the entries in 2019 and 2020, with public advertisement, were unlawful at inception and therefore not legally tenable.
This is not an isolated judgement. It sits directly after the September 20, 2024 constables ruling which the Supreme Court upheld in January this year. And in between all this, the Excise Department case of October 16 reinforced the same principle again when the Kohima Bench struck down a corrigendum and physical test that deviated from the original advertisement and said the department must either stick to what was notified or issue a fresh advertisement.
Taken together, these three cases tell one continuous story. Nagaland is not dealing with isolated ‘backdoor’ recruitment but an entrenched administrative habit of adjusting procedure, modifying rules midway and treating public recruitment as a flexible domain rather than a strict rule bound process. And in all three cases, it was not the State that corrected itself but citizens who had to approach the Court so that the rules which already existed as well as constitutional mandates are properly applied.
Against this backdrop, the ongoing Nagaland Police recruitment, one of the largest in recent years, is a critical moment. Thousands of young Nagas have already applied for the posts, with applications closing on 7 November and they are applying not for a lottery of influence, but for a fair and merit-based contest. If the present process is not airtight, there is a serious risk that two or three years later another set of petitions will challenge it and the same cycle of quashing will repeat. The loss then will fall not on those who modified the process. It will fall on the youth who complied with the rules in good faith.
The impasse over the induction of non-State Civil Service officers into the Indian Administrative Service, and the Joint Coordination Committee’s demand for merit and transparency in the selection process, can be seen in this light. The current issue appears to hinge on the entry of a shortlisted candidate bypassing established norms for open recruitment. Essentially, the pen-down strike by the JCC, representing various State Government employees’ associations, is rooted in the same principle the courts have reiterated repeatedly: no shortcut at the start should become a privilege at the end. Yet, this demand requires a balanced view.
Ironically, these associations represent the senior administrative cadre that drafts, executes, and influences procedures across departments. Good governance requires both elected leaders and the bureaucracy to uphold transparency, inwardly and outwardly.
It is time the State Government heeds the judiciary’s message: governance cannot be practised at convenience, processes and influences and so on, and any processes, including recruitment, must be fully public, documentable, and auditable. Nagaland cannot rely on the Courts to periodically patrol the doors of public employment. Transparency must not be a virtue forced by judicial intervention but a daily administrative instinct. The Courts have already done their work with clarity. Nagaland needs rule based recruitment, not post facto correction.
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