RAIPUR: Agnesia, 64, wife of a paramilitary jawan, Najariyus Toppo, spared no effort running from pillar to post, from lodging a missing person complaint in a police station to engaging in a legal battle until the court finally declared her husband's death as ‘civil death’.
Agnesia, a resident of Pidi, in the suburbs of Jashpur district, about 350 km from Raipur, in 1998, received a message from her husband, a CRPF Hawaldar posted in Jammu & Kashmir, conveying that he was availing an official leave and would meet her soon.
He then reportedly left for Jashpur but didn't reach home. He was nowhere to be found, later. On a missing person complaint filed by his wife, the local police contacted the CRPF battalion unit in J&K and carried out searches through different sources, but couldn't get any clue about him.
The CRPF, after initial scouting around and waiting seven years for Najariyus, assumed him to be no longer alive and gave the pension benefit to his wife, said Satya Prakash Tiwari, counsel of Agnesia.
But she continued to live without any proof that her husband had died. The wife consequently also lost the right to the properties owned by Najariyus, whose relatives planned to deprive her.
She presented her application to the Jashpur collector seeking an official certificate but the district magistrate rejected her plea, citing that it is beyond his jurisdiction to declare anyone as ‘civil dead’.
She didn't have any children.
In 2012, she approached the tehsil court with another plea to transfer the ownership of her husband’s properties on her name, but didn't get any outcome owing to the lack of a death certificate.
She then again approached the Jashpur collector in 2022-23 seeking to inherit the late husband’s properties and transfer it to the surviving spouse but was again denied owing to missing legal proof.
Agnes moved to the court of Civil Judge Class-1, which declared her as the legal heir of Najariyus Toppo but didn't declare him as dead. Her counsel later filed the case before the Jashpur district and sessions court.
“District judge Satyendra Kumar Sahu, after considering the circumstances, the earlier judgements given by high courts of Kolkata and Allahabad accepted the presumption of death of the person in the light of the provisions of the Indian Evidence Act. The judge stated that if no decision is taken on declaring the husband's death as ‘civil death’ then her life will turn woeful at this age," said advocate Tiwari.
The judgment finally gave the much-needed relief to the aggrieved woman after 27 years of struggle.