The main legal principle established is that a liberal and not a technical approach should be adopted in determining pension claims of freedom fighters under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme, based on the objective of honoring their sacrifices and mitigating their sufferings.

S. Siri Jagan, J.

While dealing with cases relating to claims for pension under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme of the Government of India, a question which occurred to me often was, "is the object of the pension merely to dole out some money to give some help to some freedom fighters to spend the rest of their lives or is the object a nobler one?" I have asked this question to myself time and again. I am of opinion that while honouring them with a token help in their old age, we are honouring ourselves and our great nation, which is today the largest democracy in the world, only because of the sacrifice made by those great men.This sentiment has been expressed by many Judges of various High Courts and Supreme Court time and again. The observation of the Hon'ble Supreme Court in Mukundalal Bhandari v. Union of India, AIR 1993 SC 2127 is on point in this respect. Paragraph 4 of that judgment reads thus:

"What is more, if the Scheme has been introduced with the genuine desire to assist and honour those who had given the best part of their life for the country, it ill-behaves the Government to raise pleas of limitation against such claims. In fact, the Government, if it is possible for them to do so, should find out the freedom fighters or their dependents and approach them with the pension instead of requiring them to make applications for the same. That would be the true spirit of working out such Schemes. Hence, whatever the date on which the claimants make the applications, the benefit should be made available to them."

Again, in Gurdial Singh v. Union of India and others, 2001 (8) SCC 8, the Supreme Court remark thus:

"7. Since the object of the Scheme is to honour and to mitigate the sufferings of the freedom fighters, a liberal and not a technical approach should be adopted - Hence, a claim under the Scheme should be determined on the basis of probabilities and not by applying the test of "beyond reasonable doubt"."

Very recently, in the decision in State of Tamil Nadu and another v. A. Manickam Pillai, 2010 (2) SCC 669, the Supreme Court held thus:

"This appeal is an example and a reflection of the way we treat our freedom fighters inasmuch that while we applaud their contributions to the fight for freedom, deny them a pension, which, even if granted, amounts to a pittance with while many who apply are under financial distress, all without exception, wear it as a badge of honour and as a certificate of recognition of their efforts in the struggle for independence."

2. The freedom fighters are a vanishing lot. More so are the certifiers whose certificates are necessary to prove their claim for pension. In order to enable them to get the pension, they are expected to produce proof regarding incidents that happened more than half a century ago. It does not require hair splitting arguments to conclude that it is very very difficult, if not impossible to find out such proof either in the form of primary evidence or even secondary evidence which are testimonials from other freedom fighters who are qualified to be certifiers. It is realising the said difficulty of finding proof that the scheme itself provides for proof of jail suffering, underground suffering etc., of freedom fighters, by producing co-prisoners' certificates (CPC) and personal knowledge certificates from known freedom fighters. In some classes of freedom fighters, even that may not be very easy. One such class is the INA veterans. Their contributions came late in the freedom struggle for a comparatively very short period. As such, it may not always be possible to find out co-prisoners having the required length of imprisonment of one year or more, which is the qualification for a certifier, prescribed in the SSS Pension Scheme. The case before me is a classic example of such a situation.

3. Petitioner's husband, Sri. K. Kuttan, was a soldier in the Indian National Army under our great hero, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He suffered imprisonment for