MADURAI: It will soon be 80 years since India attained Independence but for A Pambiah Thevar, a Madurai-based freedom fighter who organised protests against the British Raj for many years, it was the triumph in his decades-long legal battle against the union government that he was not alive to see.
The Union Ministry of Home Affairs rejected Pambiah’s application for freedom fighters’ pension over a technical inconsistency. His 30 years of struggle in courts came to an end recently, with the Madurai bench of Madras high court directing the centre to pay his family within one month the pension owed to him since 1995.
Pambiah Thevar first approached the high court in 2014, against the order passed by the Freedom Fighters Division of the Union Home Ministry rejecting his application in 2013. According to him, he participated in the Quit India Movement and he took out a protest march at Goripalayam, Madurai, and issued pamphlets to the public condemning the colonisers.
To evade arrest for these activities, he went ‘underground’ and continued to struggle for freedom from 1942 to 1943, he had told the court. Attesting to his participation, two well-known freedom fighters — I Mayandibharathi and A M Lakshmanan — had issued certificates as early as in 1985. Despite this, and the state government’s recommendation in his favour in 1997, the union ministry rejected his application for technical reasons.
On October 13, a bench of justices P Velmurugan and KK Ramakrishnan observed that though the ministry claimed the state had not issued requisite documents and the records were not traceable, the judges said the inability of the state government to trace the relevant records cannot, by itself, lead to the conclusion that Pambiah had not participated in the freedom struggle.
