Setback for Vijay, court cancels jobs for Karur stampede victims’ families

On Monday, after hearing the state’s defence and the petitioners’ objections, the court concluded that the appointments could not survive constitutional scrutiny.

“There are many who wait seeking employment,” the Bench observed, holding that public jobs “are not to be thrown away by the state” but must be earned through the constitutional framework governing recruitment.

The judges said the state had relied on its executive powers under Article 162 of the Constitution to justify the appointments. However, they emphasised that executive authority could not be exercised beyond constitutional limits.

“If executive action were to be left unfettered and given free hand, chaos will reign,” the court observed.

The Bench also noted that compassionate appointment is already governed by established rules and waiting lists across government departments for families of government employees who die in service. Extending the benefit outside that framework, it said, would unfairly overlook those already awaiting consideration under existing schemes.

The judges warned that permitting such appointments in the Karur case would inevitably open the door to similar demands following other tragedies, including industrial accidents, fireworks explosions and motor accidents where victims had received ex gratia compensation but not government employment.

Instead of offering public jobs, the court suggested that the government could have invested in technical education, entrepreneurship and skill development for the affected families.

“The government would be creating leaders, entrepreneurs, self-sufficient individuals,” the Bench observed, adding that the State could bear the cost of such professional training.

The litigation arose from public interest petitions filed by Madurai lawyer Theeran Thirumurugan, who challenged the validity of the Government Order issued by the newly elected TVK government. The petition argued that there was already a statutory framework governing compassionate appointments and that the Karur stampede did not fall within any recognised exception warranting a separate category of public employment.

The petitioners contended that previous tragedies had generally resulted in financial compensation rather than government jobs, and argued that creating a new class of beneficiaries without legislative backing offended the constitutional principles of equality and equal opportunity.

During the hearings, Advocate General Vijay Narayan defended the government’s decision as an exceptional humanitarian response to an unprecedented tragedy. He argued that the victims constituted a distinct class deserving special relief after losing their breadwinners while attending a public event through no fault of their own.

Describing the appointments as a conscious policy decision taken under Article 162, the Advocate General argued that monetary compensation alone could not adequately rehabilitate grieving families and dismissed suggestions that the government was pursuing political gain.

The court, however, was unpersuaded. It distinguished the Karur stampede from cases such as the Thoothukudi police firing, where government employment had been extended because the deaths arose directly from alleged excesses by the state. In the Karur incident, the judges said, no comparable basis existed to justify departing from the constitutional principles governing public recruitment.

Although the Bench acknowledged that the beneficiaries themselves had not been heard before the appointments were invalidated, it noted that its earlier interim order had expressly stated that the employment offers were temporary and subject to judicial review.