1965 war widow gets full pension after 60 years
On the death of her husband, Anguri Devi from Gurugram in Haryana, was granted special family pension by the Army. In 1972, the government introduced a fresh policy with retrospective effect covering all operations from 1947 onwards for grant of a higher amount of pension called the “Liberalised Family Pension” with financial effect and arrears from February 1, 1972
An 87-year-old war widow, Anguri Devi, whose husband Nater Pal Singh of Rajput Regiment was killed in action in the 1965 war on the western front due to a mine-blast, finally got her full dues with the intervention of the Punjab and Haryana high court.
On the death of her husband, Anguri Devi from Gurugram in Haryana, was granted special family pension by the Army. In 1972, the government introduced a fresh policy with retrospective effect covering all operations from 1947 onwards for grant of a higher amount of pension called the “Liberalised Family Pension” with financial effect and arrears from February 1, 1972. When the policy was issued, the husband of the petitioner woman had already died in 1965, but the authorities failed to give effect to the said policy for Anguri Devi.
Yet another policy was introduced on January 31, 2001, with financial effect from January 1, 1996, granting enhanced death and disability benefits in operational deaths, including deaths/disability due to mine blasts, leading to grant of “Liberalised Family Pension” but the said policy contained a cut-off date and was made applicable only to cases of death/disability occurring after January 1, 1996. The cut-off date of the year 1996 was struck down later by the Supreme Court (SC).
When the widow approached the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) in 2017, it granted her relief in 2019 citing a similar case decided by the tribunal earlier but restricted the arrears to three years prior to filing of the petition stating that she had approached the AFT with a delay of 54 years. It was this order, the woman had challenged arguing firstly, that it was the duty of the authorities to release her pension themselves, and the SC had made it clear that such benefits would be granted from January 1, 1996. Her second argument was that there was no such restriction imposed in the earlier case which the AFT had relied upon to grant her relief, which was also based on SC directions.
Setting aside the restriction by the AFT, a division bench of justice Sureshwar Thakur and justice Sudeepti Sharma held that arrears would have to be released to the war widow in terms of policy dated January 31, 2001, which meant that there would not be any restriction with regard to timeframe. “The delay was not required to be incapacitating the petitioner to become a valid recipient of a recurring and continuous right, as otherwise became conferred upon her through policy,” the bench asserted asking the authorities to calculate the arrears with 8% interest and release the same within two months.
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