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"Justice has won, even though it has been a protracted battle. The Honorable Court has provided me justice. "My prayers have been granted by the Court," the candidate informed the Bar & Bench.
Garg Rustam. Court of Punjab and Haryana
About ten years after an advertisement for the recruitment of judicial officers in Punjab was published, a candidate's protracted wait to be admitted to the judiciary was finally over when he was invited for an interview on August 21.
Rustam Garg, a candidate for the Punjab Civil Services (Judicial Branch), has been in court since 2019 but as an attorney, arguing for two marks that would have qualified him for the viva voce in 2018 for the positions posted in 2016.
The disagreement centered on a mistake in the way he totaled his marks and responded to a question about the meaning of the phrase "of first water." In May of this year, a Division Bench consisting of Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and Justice Sumeet Goel directed that the response be reexamined by a different examiner.
The Court was informed on July 11 that the evaluator had determined that Garg's response was accurate. Additionally, it was discovered that a summing error had cost him one mark. As a result, Garg received two more marks even though he had previously received 473 out of the 475 required to be eligible for viva-voce.
According to the most recent development, Garg should be invited for an interview by the District Judiciary Recruitment Committee. Chief Justice Nagu and Justice Sanjiv Berry noted the following in their August 8 order:
The Punjab Public Service Commission has notified the petitioner that the Recruitment Committee (District Judiciary) of the respondent-High Court has decided to invite the petitioner to a viva-voce scheduled for August 21, 2025, at 4:45 PM, in accordance with the order issued by this Court on July 11, 2025, in the current case.
Garg, 37, told Bar & Bench that he is still optimistic about the interview scheduled for next week.
"Justice has won, even though it has been a protracted battle. The Honorable Court has provided me justice. "My prayers have been granted by the Court," he declared.
After his lawyer died, Garg, a law student at Punjab University, presented the case on his own. For all these years, he has been a practicing lawyer.
Regarding the postponement of his case's adjudication, Garg stated,
"I'm not going to say anything bad. Everyone is undoubtedly dealing with delays, but the system cannot be fixed overnight. Pendency will cause it to take time.
Importantly, the High Court (administration) itself fixed the mistake in the Civil Law Paper's mark total. It had, however, protested against the English paper question being reexamined. Garg had responded to the question in two ways.
The inquiry concerned the definitions of specific idioms. Additionally, a candidate had to use the idioms to construct phrases. The question at hand concerned what "of the first water" meant, and Garg's response was that it meant "of the finest quality."
He had said that Le Curbusor was an architect of the first water and that Mohan was a painter of the first water.
Garg used a number of dictionaries to support his response throughout the case hearings.
The case's turning moment came on May 27, when the High Court bench led by Chief Justice Nagu stated that Garg's response could not be deemed erroneous even based on the standard of English language competence.
His argument that the evaluator should have assessed the right response, however, was rejected by the Court. According to its opinion, only the first response should have been considered.
Naturally, this Court is unable to overlook such an ex-facie flaw in the assessment. Therefore, the first response to the subject at hand necessitates re-examination," the Bench stated when directing that the response be re-examined.
Garg may be one step closer to becoming a judge himself as a result of the Court's intervention in his favor.
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