Clerical blunder deprived PoW’s kin of 13 acres

Vikramdeep Johal

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 13

A clerical blunder committed way back in 1950 has kept a World War-II martyr’s family deprived of over 13 acres of allotted land.

Lt Fauja Singh, a resident of Nago Ki Sarli village, Lyallpur district (Faisalabad), served in the Prince Albert Victor’s Own Cavalry of the Indian Armoured Corps. He died in a Japanese Prisoner of War (PoW) camp in May 1944. His family, which migrated to Amritsar district in 1947, got the tragic news from his unit’s Central Record Office at Jhansi (Madhya Pradesh).

On January 26, 1950 — the day India became a republic — a military newspaper, Jawan, published a list of “Fauji Singh” villages along with details of the land allottees and the respective sites. Lt Fauja Singh’s widow Harnam Kaur was allotted 13.25 acres at Khabba Dogran village near Tarn Taran.

However, when she and her family approached the Director General (Rehabilitation, Rural), Jalandhar, in 1950, they were told that their allotment had been withdrawn. They found out that the revenue officer concerned had mistakenly given the piece of land to another Harnam Kaur (wife of Tara Singh), who also belonged to Nago Ki Sarli village but was not eligible for the benefit in the war widow category.

The rehabilitation officer at Tarn Taran detected the error, following which the Director General’s office in Jalandhar cancelled the wrong allotment. However, the PoW case got stuck in red tape and no site was earmarked for his family.

Left in the lurch by the authorities, Lt Fauja Singh’s poverty-stricken widow Harnam Kaur put up at her brother’s house at Wazir Bhullar village in Amritsar district. The martyr’s son, Ajit Singh, died in 1971, while Harnam Kaur passed away in 1980.

Lt Fauja Singh’s grandson Ravinder Pal Singh says the family has been running from pillar to post for the past four decades, but to no avail. In 2000, he got to know from news reports that Britain was paying 10,000 pounds (about Rs 9 lakh, at today’s rates) each to the families of WW-II soldiers who had survived or died in Japanese PoW camps.

He approached his grandfather’s Jhansi-based unit, which wrote to the Army Headquarters in New Delhi in 2001 that Lt Fauja Singh’s name be included in the list of beneficiaries for the compensation. “We have got no response so far regarding our land allotment and monetary relief cases,” laments Ravinder Pal, who works for the Health Department in Amritsar.