: The Aam Aadmi Party government on Tuesday landed in a fix when the Delhi High Court asked it to file an affidavit on a petition challenging its decision to offer a job on compassionate grounds to the brother of Hyderabad University Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula who had committed suicide in January.
The Delhi government said Vemula Raja Chaithanya Kumar, brother of Mr. Vemula, was not interested in the job offered to him and therefore, the petition became infructuous.
A bench of Chief Justice G. Rohini and Justice Jayanth Nath, however, directed the Delhi government to file an affidavit replying to the petition which claimed that no guidelines were followed while offering the job to Raja.
The court was hearing a petition moved by advocate Avadh Kaushik challenging the February 24 decision passed by the Cabinet to offer a group C post to Raja and government accommodation on out of turn basis.
Against the law
When the AAP government claimed that the job was offered on a representation made by Vemula’s brother, Mr. Kaushik submitted that in response to his RTI application to the Services Department of the Delhi government, he was told that such a representation was not available with the department concerned.
Mr. Kaushik said the decision was “illegal, arbitrary, motivated, discriminatory and unjustifiable and unfair exercise of discretion without any mandate of law, statute, policy and guidelines and in clear violation of law of land and public policy, thereby infringing and abridging the legal and fundamental rights of the public at large in general and Delhi youth in particular who are trying to get jobs on their own merit but deprived by the Delhi government vide its impugned decision”.
He relied on a Supreme Court judgment which says the government is not and should not be as free as an individual in selecting the recipients of its largess.
The petitioner also said that “neither was Vemula a student of Delhi, nor was he a resident of the city. Even otherwise, suicide cannot be held as a good cause to call for giving a job on compassionate grounds to his brother”.
