Custodial Absence and Back-Pay After Acquittal – The Harbajan Singh Rule

1. Introduction

Harbajan Singh v. Superintendent of Police, Ajmer (2025 RJ-JP 31247) is a seminal pronouncement of the Rajasthan High Court that settles a recurring controversy: Is a government servant, who is kept in judicial custody, later acquitted and fully exonerated departmentally, entitled to full pay and service benefits for the period of incarceration?
Justice Anand Sharma has answered in the affirmative, striking down a departmental order that attempted to convert the custody period into “leave without pay” despite simultaneously declaring the suspension period as time spent on duty. The decision re-aligns departmental practice with Rule 54 of the Rajasthan Service Rules, 1951, and charts a clear path for similar cases nationwide.

2. Summary of the Judgment

• The petitioner, a Police Constable, was in jail from 21-08-2000 to 01-08-2002 on serious criminal charges, was suspended, tried, and ultimately acquitted.
• Departmentally, he was also exonerated; the disciplinary authority’s order of 10-10-2003 (i) counted the full suspension (21-08-2000 to 11-09-2002) as duty and (ii) granted all pay/allowances, but (iii) paradoxically treated the exact jail-period as “leave without pay”.
• Invoking Article 226, the Constable challenged only that punitive limb.
• The Court quashed the impugned portion, held the entire custody-cum-suspension period to be “on duty”, and directed payment of arrears within ten weeks.

3. Analysis

3.1 Precedents Cited

1. Raj Narain v. Union Of India, (2019) 5 SCC 809 – Supreme Court granted full wages for suspension when disciplinary proceedings were dropped and the employee later acquitted; emphasised fairness over the mechanical “no work – no pay” rule.
2. Abhaya Chandra Mishra v. State of U.P., Writ-A 67719/2013 (Allahabad HC, 20-05-2025) and Anil Kumar Singh v. State of U.P., Writ-A 11555/2021 – Both held that detention beyond the employee’s control, followed by acquittal, warrants salary protection.

The Court treats these authorities not as isolated benevolent orders but as articulations of a consistent constitutional theme: the State must not impoverish an employee it failed to convict.

3.2 Legal Reasoning

• Rule 54, Rajasthan Service Rules (RSR)
  • Sub-rule (2) mandates full pay when the employee is “fully exonerated” or suspension is “wholly unjustified”.
  • Sub-rule (4) says such period “shall be treated as duty for all purposes”.
  Justice Sharma applied this verbatim: once departmental exoneration is recorded, any contrary financial treatment violates the statute itself.
• Doctrine of Consistency
  An order cannot in the same breath grant and deny the identical benefit; the cryptic deduction of salary was “self-defeating” and hence arbitrary.
• Equitable Exception to ‘No Work, No Pay’
  Absence caused by compulsory state detention differs from willful absence; punishing an ultimately innocent employee offends Article 14 fairness.

3.3 Impact of the Decision

1. State-wide Administrative Practice
   Rajasthan departments must now adjust standing orders and circulars to ensure that custody periods ending in acquittal are not automatically treated as leave without pay.
2. National Persuasive Value
   The judgment dovetails with the Supreme Court in Raj Narain and Allahabad line of cases, strengthening a national trend; other High Courts are likely to rely on this ruling for similar fact matrices.
3. Drafting of Disciplinary Orders
   It highlights the risk of internally inconsistent operative clauses, signalling the need for clearer drafting and reasoned conclusions by disciplinary authorities.
4. Financial Liability
   Potentially significant fiscal implications: departments will have to release back-wages to acquitted employees whose pay was earlier withheld on the “absence” ground.

4. Complex Concepts Simplified

Rule 54, RSR

The statutory provision that tells the Government how to treat pay, allowances, and “duty status” after suspension or dismissal is revoked. Clause (2) is employee-friendly; Clause (3) allows partial pay in adverse findings.

Suspension vs. Custody

Suspension is an administrative status; custody is a judicial restraint on liberty. The former is at the employer’s discretion; the latter is beyond the employee’s control.

“No work, no pay”

A general labour principle that pay is for service rendered. Courts now recognise several exceptions—e.g., illegal dismissal, proven innocence after custody—where salary deprivation is inequitable.

Penultimate Part

Lawyers often refer to the second-last paragraph of an order as the “penultimate part”. In this case, that part contained contradictory directions on pay.

Article 226 Writ

The constitutional power of High Courts to issue orders for enforcement of legal rights; the preferred remedy when departmental orders violate statutory rules.

5. Conclusion

Harbajan Singh crystallises an important equitable rule in service jurisprudence: where State action (custody) prevents an employee from working, and the employee is eventually acquitted and exonerated, the detention period cannot be monetarily penalised.
The High Court’s insistence on logical consistency and faithful application of Rule 54 not only corrects an individual injustice but also advances systemic fairness. Going forward, disciplinary authorities across India will find it increasingly difficult to invoke the “no work, no pay” mantra in cases of exonerated employees who suffered involuntary custody. The judgment thus marks a definitive stride toward harmonising service law with constitutional notions of reasonableness and equity.