Jharkhand exam row: CID summons three JPSC members
Aspirants in Jharkhand have been protesting over alleged irregularities in the conduct of State competitive examinations, and the State Crime Investigation Department has now summoned three serving members of the State Public Service Commission. The detail worth pausing on is who is being summoned: not clerks or private contractors, but sitting members of a body the Constitution itself creates.
That is what lifts this above a routine law-and-order item. A State Public Service Commission is not a department of the State government. Its members are appointed by the Governor, but they can be removed only by the President, and only after an inquiry by the Supreme Court. That deliberate split exists so a Commission can return a result the government of the day dislikes without its members fearing for their jobs.
The same insulation turns awkward the moment the allegation is against the Commission itself. A State investigative agency, answerable to the State government, summoning members of a body designed to be independent of that government raises a genuine institutional question — and it is the question an examiner would set. Who holds a watchdog to account without dismantling the independence that made it a watchdog in the first place? For an aspirant, the recruitment angle is also personal: a Commission's credibility is the currency in which every candidate is paid.
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