LAHORE, July 15: The Lahore High Court has observed that appointment of a junior officer in place of a senior is violative of service rules.

The observation was made by Justice Syed Jamshed Ali while accepting a quo-warranto writ petition whereby Mian Ziauddin, an officer in the finance wing of the Punjab Local Government Department, had challenged the appointment of Rana Maqbool Ahmad as finance officer at Data Ganj Bakhsh Town.

The petitioner submitted that he had been serving in BPS-18 and Rana Maqbool in BPS-17 in the same department. He was appointed the finance officer in the town municipal administration in October 2003 but was replaced by Rana Maqbool in January 2004.

He contended that the appointment was unlawful because service rules barred the posting of a civil servant in a higher grade. The court accepted the plea and declared the posting of Rana Maqbool Ahmad unlawful even for administrative expediency, as a senior Punjab government law officer had been deposed by it.

The court held that the secretary to local government had not taken the relevant service rules into consideration while ordering appointment of a junior officer at a senior position.

The court also observed that the secretary had made the appointment out of political consideration and not in accordance with legal provisions. The court also found that the appointment of Rana Maqbool was motivated by favouritism because the Nazim of Data Ganj Bakhsh Town, Khawaja Ahmad Hassan, wanted him as the finance officer.

The point was made in a report submitted to the court by the secretary to local government who stated that the town Nazim was interested in retaining Rana Maqbool. As for an additional advocate-general defending the appointment on the basis that the Punjab Local Council Service (Appointments and Conditions of Service) Rules-1983 were silent on the issue, the court held that provisions of the Punjab Civil Servants (Appointment and Conditions of Service) Rules-1974 would apply in such cases.

The court held that even for an ad-hoc appointment, the senior-most officer had to be posted for the sake of competence. The order of the secretary to local government, according to the judgment, in no way showed that the appointment was temporary administrative arrangement.

The judgment declared the post vacant by quoting a decision of the late Justice Mohammad Rustam Kiyani which said: "The old decisions, like IM Lall's, applied in the context of sovereignty, and sovereignty now belongs to the All Almighty alone, says the preamble of the constitution. Even if the preamble had been less pious, the King-can-do-no-wrong theory was by its nature inapplicable to a democratic state."