Red tape makes deceased colonel’s parents miss military plane to Bengaluru

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 11

An elderly couple in their 70s are making an emergency road trip from New Delhi to Bengaluru to ‘see’ their dead son one last time.

The body of Col Navjot Singh Bal from 2 Para is at a morgue of a military hospital in Bengaluru. He died of cancer on April 9.

Colonel Bal’s parents — Lt Col KS Bal (retd) and mother Ramninder Kaur – started off on April 10 on a 2,100 km road trip that will culminate in Bengaluru, possibly on Saturday night.

“The cremation of Bal, 39, has been held up,” a Para-SF mate of Col Bal told The Tribune.

Aarti, the wife of the colonel, awaits the elderly couple for the last rites of her husband. The colonel leaves behind two sons – aged 8 and 4.

With no commercial flights or trains operating, the family was given the option of transporting the colonel’s body on a military aircraft to Delhi. However, the family wanted the cremation in Bengaluru, Army officials said.

The option was explored if the elderly couple could be flown in on a military plane to Bengaluru. Thanks to confusion at several levels in the Ministry of Defence and the military establishment, the senior Bals could not be accommodated on a military plane which was anyway scheduled between Palam (New Delhi) and Bengaluru on April 10.

Sources said Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, acting on a request from the office of the Chief of Defence Staff, permitted the flight for the senior Bals on board a C-17 transport plane of the IAF on April 10.

Since the C-17 flight was at the requisition of the MHA, someone in the military establishment thought it was better to take sanction from the MHA. The MHA telephonically informed that it had ‘no problem’ if the Bals were flown, sources said.

The fact that a retired military man was going for the ‘last darshan’ of his dead son – a gallantry-award-winning soldier — did not cut through the red tape. The military establishment insisted on a written sanction from the MHA. In turn, the MHA told officials coordinating the flight that a request for such a sanction need not even come to it as there is no rule for the MHA to allow or deny permission for military planes or passengers on board such planes.

Sources in the know of things said the telephonic nod from the MHA should have been noted and orders passed accordingly; these are unusual times and needed an out-of-the-box solution. Also, the Bal family was ready to pay for the flight. In places like Leh, civilians are often ferried to Chandigarh on military planes during winter months as there are no flights. Also, since the Defence Minister is heading the Group of Ministers on Covid, permission from him was more than enough.

An official said a matter which should have ended at the table of the Joint Secretary (Air) in the MoD has turned into a blame game. Retired veterans are blaming the babus in the MoD and also, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), without realizing that the fault was at multiple levels, including within the military.

Meanwhile, on the night intervening April 9 and April 10 as the MoD, MHA and military were deciding on the rule book, long-time mates of Colonel Bal from the tightly-knit community of Para-SF collected Rs 22 lakh and chartered a helicopter that could pick up the elderly couple from an airport between Delhi and Bengaluru. That, however, did not materialise and the Bals are now on the road journey.