E-Paper
Lt Col killed in Op Rakshak accident: Give pension equal to last drawn pay to officer’s widow, rules AFT
Lt Col Indranuj, 42, of the 116 Engineers Regiment was swept away while he was crossing a causeway in Nagrota (Jammu) on July 16, 2008.
The agony of Jonalima Borgohain, widow of a lieutenant colonel who died in an operational move in a counter-insurgency area as his vehicle was swept away in flashfloods, was alleviated after 10 years when she was granted ‘liberalised’ family pension by the Jammu Bench of the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT).
As per the AFT order, Jonalima is now entitled to get the family pension equal to the last pay drawn by the officer.
Lt Col Indranuj Borgohain’s, 42, of the 116 Engineers Regiment was swept away while he was crossing a causeway in Nagrota (Jammu) on July 16, 2008, during the troop ‘movement’ for Operation Rakshak, counter-insurgency operations in Jammu and Kashmir.
His death was declared a battle casualty by the statutory Court of Inquiry and military authorities. The office of the Principal Controller of Defence Accounts, however, refused to release the applicable liberalised family pension to Jonalima, saying the casualty did not occur in a war-like situation.
The families of armed forces personnel killed in war or war-like operations, counter insurgency operations or in an encounter with or in incident involving armed hostiles, terrorists, extremists, anti-social elements etc, are entitled to the liberalised family pension.
Relying on judgments of the Punjab & Haryana and Delhi high courts and a government policy that clearly provides that deaths occurring in notified operational areas are entitled to ‘liberalised family pension’, the AFT bench, headed by Justice MS Chauhan and Vice Admiral AG Thapliyal,
set aside the rejection order and directed the government to release the liberalised family pension within four months.
The Delhi high court had earlier in a similar case observed that personnel posted in notified operational areas were “intrinsically connected with the success of such operations” and that such “textual interpretation” of beneficial policies should be avoided.
The HC had also recorded that “this Court cannot resist observing that when individuals place their lives in peril in the line of duty, the sacrifices that they are called upon to make cannot ever be lost sight of through a process of abstract rationalisation.”
A committee of experts constituted by the then defence minister Mahohar Parrikar had, in 2015, strongly deprecated the attitude of the Defence Accounts Department, remarking, “We are at a loss to comprehend why negative energy and multiple reams of papers should be wasted on such issues concerning benefits of soldiers and deceased soldiers, which are anyway minor from the organisational point of view, when there are much more important financial matters worth pondering over. We find it difficult to digest as to how logic itself is being stretched to illogical limits due to an all-pervasive pessimistic environment just to deny benefits to our men and women in uniform.”
