MUZAFFARABAD: At long last, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) government has taken the first step towards resurrecting the virtually dysfunctional Public Service Commission (PSC) by appointing its chairman and three out of nine members.

As per an official notification, which carried the date of January 13 (Saturday) but surfaced on Sunday, the government had appointed the chairman and three members for a three-year term under Article 48 (2) of the AJK Constitution, 1974, read with Section 3 of the Azad Jammu & Kashmir Public Service Commission (AJKPSC) Act, 1986.

Retired Lt-Gen Hidayatur Rehman was appointed as chairman, while former secretary to the AJK government Aijaz Hussain Lone, former director general of the Auqaf department Hafiz Muhammad Ibrahim Aziz, and former district and sessions judge Khawaja Saeed Bashir Butt were appointed as members.

Section 3(i)(ii) of the PSC Act reads: “Seven members of the commission shall be appointed from amongst the retired civil servants or other outstanding persons, having a good reputation and educational background of not less than graduation from any recognised university; and three members of the commission shall be appointed from the educationists or scholars, having a good reputation and experience of not less than 10 years of teaching, administration, or both.”

The three-year term of the previous chairman and members had expired in May last year and ever since the present coalition government had been sitting tight on the composition of the PSC, notwithstanding anguished calls by the unemployed educated youth and the tiny opposition.

On Saturday, opposition PTI lawmaker Rafique Nayyar publicly censured the AJK’s coalition government for closing legitimate channels of employment for educated youth by avoiding the mandatory composition of the PSC.

Interestingly, on November 17 last year, Justice Syed Shahid Bahar of the AJK High Court had also taken exception to the non-composition of the PSC since May 2023, owing to which, he had noted, “the constitutional body established for the purpose of conducting tests and examinations for recruitment to the civil services of the state was dysfunctional for all its practical purposes.”

Justice Bahar had categorically directed the relevant quarters [the president and the government] to do the needful pertaining to the composition of the PSC within a period of one month from the date of the pronouncement of his judgment.

Nevertheless, it took the government almost two months to abide by the judgment, and that too to a limited extent.

The new AJK PSC chairman belongs to the Astore Valley of Gilgit-Baltistan and had held the positions of corps commander Peshawar and inspector general training and evaluation in GHQ before his retirement from the army on October 1, 2018.

He is the third chairman of this constitutional body in succession who is an ex-serviceman.

Prior to him, Air Marshal retired Masood Akhtar, who belonged to Kotli, had served as chairman from May 2020 to May 2023, and Lt-Gen retired Mohsin Kamal, who belonged to Muzaffarabad, had served as chairman from December 2016 to December 2019.

Before that, Justice Khawaja Shahad Ahmed, a retired chief justice of the AJK Supreme Court, was at the head of the PSC.

However, on December 16, 2016, the then PML-N government terminated the services of the chairman and nine members, around 28 months after their appointment by the previous PPP government, while charging them with “committing malpractices or gross illegality and for not performing duties efficiently and in a transparent manner.”

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2024