New Delhi, Dec. 25 -- High courts must not only dispense justice by upholding equality and fairness in their judicial role but also embody those constitutional values in their own administrative functioning, the Supreme Court has underlined, warning that discriminatory treatment of employees strikes at the heart of the Constitution's guarantees of non-arbitrariness and reasonableness. "High Courts, being Constitutional courts entrusted to uphold equality and fairness, are expected to encompass such principles within their own administrative functioning as well, and must exemplify the standards of a model employer. Such principles are at the risk of being undermined when discriminatory treatment is meted out to employees similarly situated within the same establishment. Such actions pose grave threat to the sacrosanct principles of non-arbitrariness and reasonableness," held a bench of justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi. The court made the observation while setting aside a series of judgments of the Allahabad high court that denied regularisation to a group of Class-III employees, even as several similarly placed employees were granted the same benefit under orders passed by successive chief justices of the court. The appeals arose from the refusal of the Allahabad high court to regularise the services of operator-cum-data entry assistants and routine grade clerks who had been appointed on an ad-hoc basis under the powers exercised by the then chief justice under the Allahabad High Court Officers and Staff (Conditions of Service and Conduct) Rules, 1976. While numerous employees appointed through the same route were regularised, the appellants were singled out and denied parity. Calling the distinction "arbitrary, unreasonable and superficial", the Supreme Court held in a judgment last week that employees appointed through an identical channel could not be treated differently merely because their appointment letters carried varying stipulations, such as being labelled "ad-hoc" or containing conditions for an examination that was never conducted....