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Najma Khatun v. The State of West Bengal

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026 INSC 691Decided 13 Jul 2026
Writ Petition (Civil) No. 566/2024 (with 48 connected writ petitions)
Justice Dipankar Datta · Justice Augustine George Masih

Background

This was a batch of 49 writ petitions filed directly in the Supreme Court by more than 350 teachers and non-teaching staff of various madrasahs in West Bengal, who claimed they had been wrongly denied salary and service benefits. Their appointments traced back to a long-running legal battle over the West Bengal Madrasah Service Commission Act, 2008 and related notifications governing how minority-run, state-aided madrasahs could hire staff: a dispute that had already reached the Supreme Court once before in an earlier case (Sk. Mohd. Rafique).

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court dismissed the entire batch of petitions. Closely examining a representative sample of 13 petitioners' appointments, it found they were not validly made: some relied on a notification clause allowing appointment without any competitive selection, which the Court held was itself unconstitutional because public money cannot fund closed-door, non-competitive appointments; others were made during a period when the relevant legal provisions had been judicially stayed and therefore had no legal force. The Court further held that any appointment made after 14 March 2016 without the Supreme Court's express permission was automatically illegal, given the pending litigation. Having rejected the claims, the Court held there was no basis to order any salary arrears, though it declined to impose costs on the petitioners.

Lesson Learnt

Even sympathetic, long-serving employees cannot enforce an appointment that was made through a non-competitive process or during a period when the law authorising it was under judicial stay: public employment, including in aided minority institutions, must follow a lawful and merit-based process from the outset, and courts will not retroactively validate defective appointments merely because people have been working for years.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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