The Hindu : Front Page : IAF jobs: Government to appeal against court order

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 10, 2004

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Front Page

IAF jobs: Government to appeal against court order

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, NOV. 9. The Government will move the Supreme Court against Monday's Delhi High Court order cancelling four top-level appointments in the Indian Air Force, the Defence Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said here today.

``We will be moving a special leave petition against the order,'' he said. The plea would be framed after studying the judgment.

Mr. Mukherjee also said the Government was expediting the setting up of an Armed Forces Tribunal to tone up the military's internal grievance redress machinery. A large number of military officers and other ranks approached civilian courts as they felt that in a dispute, the present mechanism tended to discriminate against the lower ranking official.

Mr. Mukherjee made the observations after inaugurating the Coast Guard commanders' conference, where last year the then Defence Minister, George Fernandes, appealed to service personnel not to approach civilian courts in large numbers.

The latest High Court judgment upheld the appeals by two superceded IAF officials and held that the promotion policy of 2002— which denied them promotion and forced one of them to retire— was flawed. It asked the IAF to quash the appointments of four senior officers, including the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff and the Eastern Command chief, and set up a promotion board afresh to review the cases of the two superceded officials. ``The treatment of the two petitioners is a classic case of indifference, high-handedness, arbitrariness and irrationality,'' said the order.

Mr. Mukherjee said the four officers were promoted in conformity with the policy existing at that time. Later, the Defence Ministry persuaded the IAF to tone down some of the criteria that were viewed by it as subjective, said a senior Ministry official.

Modernisation

Mr. Mukherjee said if the United Nations-sponsored international conference on Law of the Sea allowed the expansion of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) for all nations, India would have to expand and modernise the Navy as well as the Coast Guard. ``The EEZ would go up by one and a half times. If it happens, we will have to protect a larger area.''

Acknowledging the shortage of manpower in the Navy and the Coast Guard, Mr. Mukherjee said the Finance Ministry would be requested to allow fresh recruitment to make up for shortages in certain categories.

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