In a relief to India’s young who engage in agitations against the establishment, the Supreme Court held that employers may forgive youngsters who suppress or submit false information in their job verification forms if their criminal past involves only a “trivial” offence like “shouting slogans at a young age or stealing bread.”
“McCarthyism is antithesis to constitutional goal, chance of reformation has to be afforded to young offenders in suitable cases,” a three-judge Bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Arun Mishra and P.C. Pant observed in a recent judgment.
The Bench was settling the law on how far and when an employer should ignore suppression of information or submitting false information in a job verification form.
To explain its dictum that “mere involvement in some petty kind of case would not render a person unsuitable for a job”, the Bench referred to a 1983 case law — State of Madhya Pradesh versus Ramashanker Raghuvanshi — which concerned a municipal school teacher who was terminated on the basis of a police report that he had participated in “RSS and Jan Sangh activities”, and thus not fit for government service. The apex court had overturned his dismissal.
“... Most students and most young men take part in political activities, and if they do get involved in some form of agitation or the other, is it to be to their ever lasting discredit? Sometimes they feel strongly on injustice and resist. They are sometimes pushed into the forefront by elderly persons who lead and mislead them. Should all these young men be debarred from public employment? Is government service such a heaven that only angels should seek entry into it?” Justice Mishra, who authored the verdict, quoted from the 1983 case law.
The judgment refers to the character Jean Valjean, who was branded a thief for his whole life for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family, in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables . “The modern approach should be to reform a person instead of branding him a criminal all his life,” the court held.
