Allegations of corruption and irregularities in back-to-back recruitment exercises in Jammu and Kashmir have raised a question mark over the government’s promise of providing clean administration following the August 2019 revocation of the erstwhile state’s special status.

Jammu and Kashmir High Court on Thursday cancelled a renewed recruitment process for hundreds of police sub-inspectors’ and junior engineers’ posts because the contract for the recruitment exam had been awarded to an agency blacklisted by three state governments.

Five months earlier, the original recruitment process had been scrapped by the Union Territory government over corruption charges.

There was some relief for the government on Friday when a division bench stayed Thursday’s order by a single judge after the administration argued the award to the agency had preceded its blacklisting by other governments. The case will go on, as will the recruitment process for now.

In July, the Union Territory administration had cancelled the merit lists for 1,200 sub-inspectors, 1,300 junior engineers and 1,000 financial account assistants and ordered a CBI investigation, bowing to massive protests and allegations of large-scale corruption, including a paper leak, in the recruitment exams.

The now-tainted recruitment process is the first since the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, advertised as a means to freeing the region of its “corrupt” politicians and ushering in clean and transparent administration. The fiasco has affected over one lakh job aspirants.

On Thursday, Justice Waseem Sadiq Nargal described the resumed recruitment process as mala fide and regretted that “the illegalities in the present case are not isolated individual acts of malpractice but systemic illegalities that raise serious questions regarding the legitimacy of the entire selection/ tender process”.

The government’s main recruitment agency, the Jammu and Kashmir State Subordinate Board (JKSSB), had given the contract to Aptech Limited, a company blacklisted for alleged malpractices in recruitment exams to the Uttar Pradesh power department, Rajasthan police and the Assam irrigation department.

A group of job aspirants had petitioned the high court against the contract being awarded to a blacklisted agency, and argued that the JKSSB had dropped from the tender the requirement for applicants to declare they had never been blacklisted.

The high court on Thursday directed the government to form a panel headed by a retired high court judge to probe “brazen irregularities/ illegalities in changing the terms/ conditions of the tender and award (of the) contract to an agency which has previously facilitated malpractices in public examinations”.

The CBI, probing the first round of the recruitment process that was cancelled in July, has arrested over a dozen men including a BSF commandant. Agency sources have claimed that posts of sub-inspectors had sold for Rs 20 lakh to Rs 30 lakh.