The Supreme Court has pulled up the Indian Air Force (IAF) for harassing an airman with disciplinary proceedings for merely overtaking his superior officer’s vehicle at a railway level crossing in 2010.

A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Sandeep Mehta awarded a compensation of ₹1 lakh to airman S.P. Pandey to be paid by the Centre and the IAF for unnecessarily pushing him to fight a protracted legal battle spanning over 15 years for a petty offence.

“Small excesses like overtaking the vehicle of one’s senior at a railway crossing may be an incident of indiscipline in defence services, but the balance and proportion that need to be maintained between such an infraction and its punishment will always be at the core of good governance. If the balance is not maintained, the distinction between bad governance, impropriety, unfairness and inhuman treatment is not much. The tribunal is right in holding that a small incident has unnecessarily grown beyond proportion,” Justice Narasimha, who authored the judgment, observed.

The court passed the directions while allowing an appeal filed by Pandey against the order passed by the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT)in Jaipur, which while setting aside the punishment of“admonition” imposed on him by the IAF on January 18,2011, refrained from awarding him any monetary compensation for the physical, financial and mental agony undergone by him.