The Army has been in the news for a few years now not always for the right reasons. The succession trauma that saw Gen. Bikram Singh replacing V.K. Singh will be stretched out some more with Lt. Gen. Ravi Dastane, deputy chief of the Integrated Defence Staff, deciding to take the matter of the elevation of Lt. Gen. Dalbir Singh Suhag as the Eastern Army commander to the Armed Forces Tribunal.

Like the V.K. Singh episode, this one too can be expected to land up in the Supreme Court docket. While V.K. Singh, for reasons unclear, was satisfied with the Supreme Court merely “restoring his honour” rather than pronouncing on the larger principle at stake and which he went to the court for — which was that whether or not for career management purposes records of serving officers with the Adjutant General’s Office are paramount. It truncated his tenure as Army Chief without establishing the principle. But the Lt. Gen. Suhag promotion has prompted Lt. Gen. Dastane, who may insist on the Supreme Court being specific about promotion rules and criteria.
Worse, with V.K. Singh on the cusp of entering “politics” full-time, an unnecessary debate has been spurred about the propriety of retired military men entering the soiled political arena. Some veterans — with a lifetime’s habit of staying away from politics — have harrumphed that this is a bad precedent to set. Some fairly ludicrous suggestions have been floated by media commentators, among these that he should give up his rank. India is a bona fide democracy, not a banana republic as a bumptious bottom-feeder from the Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi’s household had the temerity to call the country. The Indian Army, moreover, is a volunteer citizen force of enormous historical weight, not some rag-tag group that is anybody’s plaything. As a citizen military, moreover, the regret is not that V.K. Singh seeks entry into the political ranks, but rather that more generals and colonels and majors are not already in politics.

The country needs more citizens with a military background in Parliament, not fewer. And after a rough-hewn career in the field, politics should be pursued by soldiers as an avocation, not a vocation that the workaday politicians have made it. Indeed, the bulk of persons with a military background have fared well in Parliament and in state legislatures. People like Jaswant Singh, former major, Central India Horse, and a foreign minister displaying diplomatic verve and finesse during the BJP coalition government, and Maj. Gen. B.C. Khanduri (Retd), an Army engineer, who as chief minister hauled Uttarakhand out of the pits, are role models. Generals in democratic politics have been an honourable station since the age of Pericles, who commanded two campaigns against Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars and was freely elected by the Athenian people to lead their government twice.
If the Army has had a hard time of it in terms of controversy attending on leadership transitions at the highest levels, it has not been lucky in terms of augmenting its capabilities either. Leave alone not getting an offensive mountain corps, the very concept was gutted by defence minister A.K. Antony, who is proving to be one of the great mishaps the military has run into. He has both conspicuously failed in his one-point agenda to remove the taint of corruption, and with his risk-averse attitude has actually compounded the problem with decisions being delayed, or, when taken, having been controversial. He started with zero aptitude — and not being a quick study on issues alien to him — has not graduated over the years in office beyond the kindergarten-level in terms of understanding national security-related issues. Nor has he developed an instinct for making correct decisions. Worse, he has introduced the give and take of politics into military choices by configuring a grand bargain that saw him approve a full-fledged combat aviation arm for the Army in the face of severe resistance from the Air Force and then, to placate Vayu Bhavan, mooted a “joint solution” that the Army has been enjoined to work out with IAF, entailing the formal burial of the offensive mountain corps concept, because of the IAF’s belief that it can unleash its aircraft for punitive strikes against the Chinese Army in Tibet, and that this is enough to deter the hard-headed men running the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

It puts one in mind of the joint air-land exercise put up by the 4th Infantry Division in Ambala in 1958 to over-awe the visiting Chinese military delegation headed by the PLA commander in Tibet. Screaming Hunter aircraft overhead in ground attack mode, dropped bombs, made repeated strafing runs and cleared the path for advancing infantry — all of which impressed the Chinese commander not a whit. “This is all very impressive,” the Chinese commander is reported as telling his Indian counterpart commanding the 4th Division, Maj. Gen. B.M. Kaul, “but, tell me, will you have the aircraft in a real war?” The PLA general got his answer three years later with the 7th Brigade of Kaul’s own 4th Division being decimated on the Namka Chu river at a time when Kaul himself was appointed commander of IV Corps created overnight for him by his distant uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister’s complaisant defence minister V.K. Krishna Menon and an “obedient” Army Chief, Gen. Pran Nath Thapar. All this happened, it must be remembered, as the IAF remained inert throughout the war.

Going by his recollections of his career, the IAF Chief in 1962, Air Marshal A.M. Engineer, did not push for the Air Force to go into action. Maybe, like his more recent successors, he too subsided in his belief that air action is inherently escalatory. What’s the guarantee that IAF won’t again escape, doing nothing in another showdown in the Himalayas? And then, the Army bereft of any real offensive capability that would have won the PLA’s respect, will be compelled to merely defend. We know where that will get the Army — another ignominious end.