Veterans taken for a ride by bureaucrats

The Tribune 31 Dec 2010
Veterans at the mercy of whimsical decision-makers
Maj Navdeep Singh

“All is fair in love and war” was the answer I got from a senior functionary in the Ministry of Defence, when I pointed out that the ministry had recently cited an outdated Naval Pension Regulation before the Supreme Court to get a case decided in its favour. Is it a war that we are waging against our veterans?

The problem runs deep. While officers from the uniformed services and the IAS come and go, those permanently ensconced in the ministry and the service headquarters, on whom we tend to overly depend, rule the roost. There is a feeling amongst key intermediary appointments that defence personnel with their subsidised liquor and free rations are already a pampered lot and that they do not deserve more, and hence every single welfare related attempt by the defence services is firewalled with noting on file that become difficult to counter. In all welfare-related spheres, the rules and regulations seem to be diametrically opposed to logic. Pensionary provisions are the worst, with numerous cut-off dates, irrational stipulations and categories within categories. An honorary naib subedar who retired after January 1, 2006 would get the pension of a regular naib subedar, but a similarly placed person who retired prior to this date would get the pension of a havildar. A 100 per cent disabled general who retired in 2006 would get Rs 27,000 as disability pension while an officer of the same rank with the same disability who retired in 2005 would get less than Rs 6,000. In a socially retrograde move, a widow who remarried prior to 2006 would lose her right to ordinary family pension but not the one who remarried after 2006. It seems the government is regressively opposed to remarriage of widows who unfortunately lost their husbands prior to 2006.

The list is never-ending. The bare fact that the defence services have the highest rate of pension related litigation in the country should have led to some revolutionary changes, but nothing positive seems to be happening and the pension department of the defence ministry continues to be operationalised by a single officer who runs the show and thrusts his decisions on millions of pensioners in stark contrast to the Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare on the civilian side.

An overhaul of the functioning of medical boards as well as the rules related to grant of disability benefits is also required. The system of determining whether disabilities are “attributable to, or aggravated by military service” also requires a re-look since the guidelines on this are more mathematical and less medical. For example, for post traumatic stress disorder to be declared as service-related, we are still governed by the otiose requirement that a person needs to be posted in a field area for a particular length of time, or for instance, the requirement that symptoms should manifest themselves within 3 months of being denied leave in case of the death of a parent when the individual happens to be the only son. Modern medical science, on the other hand, has now proved that the manifestation of such symptoms has no relation with length of operational service and can even happen instantly due to one solitary incident which may happen in a single day and can at times occur as a case of delayed onset even five years after a stressful event. And can a person not be affected if he is not the “only” son and would not the problem be service-connected if the symptoms arise, say after three and a half months rather than the mathematical guideline of 3 months?

While psychiatric disorders need to be examined on a case-by-case basis, we are still stuck in the primitive times with numerical yardsticks. Leave aside medical science, it is understood even by a layman that psychiatric disorders are commonly aggravated by issues such as education of children, property disputes, family problems, etc. when the person is deployed on military duty, peace or field. For cardiovascular disorders, the charter of duties of last 14 days prior to the problem is considered and service-connection is only granted if any stress and strain is observed in the said period. However it is common knowledge that such diseases manifest on account of stress and strain experienced over a long period of time and a 14 days window has no medical relevance whatsoever. Too much mathematical emphasis is laid on field service, forgetting that there can be high pressure appointments in peace stations too which can result in far greater stress than in field stations.

The malaise can only be addressed if the defence services start posting upcoming and brilliant officers in the service directorates dealing with manpower and personnel who constructively provide their inputs to the process of decision-making and act as a counter-balance to elements who harbour an erroneous feeling that faujis are already getting more than they deserve. The element of sadism also needs to be curbed. If the feeling at the decision making level remains ‘”why should he get what I am not getting”, then it would be an exercise in futility to expect anything productive, and in that event, the “war” against veterans, especially against disabled soldiers, war-wounded, widows and pensioners, shall continue unabated.
The writer practices in the Punjab and Haryana High Court
Veterans at the mercy of whimsical decision-makers