Observing bias and professional animosity in the grading of a Major General over his conduct of a sensitive Court of Inquiry (COI), the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) has directed the Army to expunge the impugned portions of the officer’s confidential report (CR) and consider the officer, who has since retired, afresh for notional promotion to the rank of Lieutenant General.Major General JK Shukla, an Army Air Defence (AAD) officer of the 1984 batch, was considered for promotion by the Special Selection Board (SSB) in the non-general cadre staff stream as a ‘fresh’ case in December 2018 and as a ‘first review’ case in May 2020, but was not empanelled on either occasion.In the cadre-specific AAD Corps, he was considered as a fresh case in October 2020, but was held to be ineligible on the ground that he was retiring before the occurrence of a vacancy for the appointment of Director General, AAD.Thereafter, he filed non-statutory and statutory complaints against his non-promotion, which were rejected by the Defence Ministry on the grounds that he was not empanelled due to his overall profile, relative merit and comparative evaluation.He stated before the AFT that out of 48 ‘box-gradings’ earned by him as Brigadier and Major General, 47 endorsements were the highest possible grade of ‘9’ (Outstanding). However, in one instance, the reviewing officer (RO) downgraded his box-grading to ‘8’, which stood as the sole, stark aberration in an otherwise flawless record.He contended that the downgraded assessment was entirely devoid of professional objectivity and was not based on his operational or administrative performance, but was the direct result of official and institutional bias stemming from his appointment as the presiding officer of a highly sensitive Court of Inquiry (COI) ordered to investigate alleged financial improprieties in the hiring of civilian vehicles in the Northern Command.He claimed that he evaluated the record independently and found the relevant documents to be uncorroborated, tampered with and factually incorrect. Accordingly, he recommended handing over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) due to the involvement of civilians.He further averred that, because he refused to succumb to official pressure to align or alter the COI findings to suit particular interests, a hostile, frosty and vindictive attitude developed against him within the higher command hierarchy.He submitted that this was established by the timing of the said CR, which immediately followed the closure of the COI. The CR was also endorsed by the RO after withholding it for 90 days, whereas the rules prescribe a period of 30 days.Observing that the applicant’s appointment as presiding officer carried significant implications for the subsequent assessment of his CR, the Tribunal Bench comprising Justice Rajendra Menon and Lt Gen CP Mohanty said in its order dated September 24 that it was clear that the same RO who awarded him an “above average” grading in the instant CR had previously awarded him an “outstanding” grading in the immediately preceding CR, without recording any specific justification for the sudden downgradation in the impugned report.“This unexplained fluctuation in grading by the same RO within a short temporal span without any intervening adverse event or performance deficit raises a reasonable likelihood of bias that cannot be lightly dismissed, particularly in light of the applicant’s role as presiding officer in the COI, which may have been a case of professional friction or personal animus on the part of the RO,” the Bench ruled.