Click to play videoNew Delhi: Meet Gopal Krishna Munshi, one of the unsung heroes to whom India owes its Independence, who along with the Mahatma fought for India's freedom some 60 years ago.
Munshi has faded from public memory, but it now seems that there are others who have even been wiped off from Government records, because the Home Ministry has admitted for the first time in Parliament that it doesn't know how many freedom fighters or dependents there are.
So lax is the monitoring that even the Minister, it seems, has no idea. But when confronted with the question, Minister of State, Home, Sriprakash Jaiswal, answers with a defiant, "How is it possible that we won't know? We give the money so we will have the records.''
Freedom fighters get a pension of Rs 10,000 and perks from the Centre alone in addition to state government help. However, the very few checks and balances mean mushrooming phoney patriots.
Bihar has the maximum number of freedom fighters followed by Maharashtra and Kerala. In all, over 3,000 freedom fighters have been weeded out till date.
However, the Centre continues to give pension to a whopping 1.7 lakh freedom fighters, even 60 years after Independence.
Says Sarita Devi, who participated in the freedom movement, "These fakes are grabbing Government funds."
The Home Ministry has now started an exercise to find out just how many freedom fighters there in the country.
Even as our politicians bicker over the first war of Independence, one question the Father of the Nation would have liked to ask our Parliamentarians is -- where were all these freedom fighters when we were toiling for our Independence?
(With inputs from Prabhakar Kumar in Patna)
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