The Punjab and Haryana High Court has dismissed a Public Interest Litigation seeking to stall the appointment of Advocate Pravindra Chauhan as a Judge of the High Court, holding that the petition was actuated by personal vendetta rather than genuine public interest, and imposed costs of ₹1,00,000 to be deposited with the Poor Patient Welfare Fund, PGIMER, Chandigarh.

A Division Bench of Acting Chief Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Justice Rohit Kapoor was hearing a plea filed by one Pradeep Singh seeking a writ of mandamus directing the Union of India to keep in abeyance the recommendations of the High Court Collegium and the Supreme Court Collegium, and to recall the recommendation for Chauhan's elevation.

The petitioner also sought a direction to the High Court not to administer the oath of office to Chauhan.

Appearing for the Union, Additional Solicitor General Satya Pal Jain, along with Senior Advocate Chetan Mittal for the High Court and Additional Advocate General Maninder Singh Garcha for Punjab, raised a preliminary objection that the petition was an abuse of process, filed to settle personal scores. It was pointed out that the petitioner had earlier filed a PIL seeking a writ of quo warranto against Chauhan's appointment as Advocate General, Haryana, which was dismissed on 21.01.2026.

That earlier petition had itself disclosed the petitioner's grievance relating to his discharge from service at the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission (HERC), where Chauhan had earlier served as a Judicial Member.

Counsel for the petitioner argued that despite the earlier round of litigation, there was no bar to maintaining the present PIL, since it raised concerns about the fitness of a person to hold high constitutional office.

The Bench noted that the petitioner did not dispute either the earlier PIL against Chauhan's appointment as Advocate General or the disciplinary proceedings that led to his own discharge from HERC service during the period Chauhan served there.

Observing that the appointment process for a High Court Judge routed through the High Court Collegium, State Government, Union Law Ministry, and finally the Supreme Court Collegium, with intelligence inputs collected at each stage, is an exhaustive one, the Court held it “would not be open to ordinarily question the recommendations made therein” at the instance of a litigant with a personal grievance.

“The process itself is exhaustive, and it would not be open to ordinarily question the recommendations made therein, particularly when the challenge is laid by a person who approaches the Court with a personal axe to grind,” observed the bench.

Invoking the Balwant Singh Chaufal guidelines requiring courts to verify a petitioner's credentials and screen out PILs filed for extraneous or oblique motives, the Bench concluded that the successive petitions filed by Pradeep Singh against Chauhan — first as quo warranto, and now the present plea — betrayed a personal grudge rather than bona fide public interest, and that “such attempts must be thwarted at very outset.”

Case Title: Pradeep Singh v. Union of India and Others, CWP-PIL-212-2026 (O&M)

Appearances: Jagmohan Singh Bhatti for the petitioner; ASG Satya Pal Jain with Saigeeta Srivastava for the Union of India; Senior Advocate Chetan Mittal with Ranjit Singh Kalra, Avichal Sharma and Adhiraj Sood for the High Court; Senior Advocate Maninder Singh Garcha, AAG Punjab, with Samdisha Kaur, AAG, for the State of Punjab.

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