Civil leaders fail India's military
JK Dutt, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta, India
The Statesman's editorial Tarnished brass (March 15) on the dilution of moral values in India's armed forces provided a one- sided picture. It was time-framed to an era that existed half a century ago. It is out of sync with this age. A more holistic examination is needed.
The editorial says: "Serving the Indian army ... has been hailed as a matter of honor simply because its sinews and strengths were forged by a set of values. Officers commanded not by the powers vested in them by the manuals but by sheer personal qualities. Their men had complete faith and trust in them; they would follow them into the jaws of death. It was moral authority at its most noble. It is that brand of authority that has to be restored".
In any democracy, civilian control over the services is axiomatic. However, to be sure that this control remains free from aspersion casting, the controlling civilian authority must display unequivocal fair play in extremely delicate but crucial civil-military relations. India has consistently failed in this since Independence and it is this failure that has brought about a very sorry state of affairs today.
"A feeling of having been let down would be putting it mildly; betrayal might be a more apt description" -- thus runs a sentence in the editorial, expanding on officer-jawan links. Very true, but the point is, from which level does this betrayal emanate? A dispassionate dissection would be instructive. The 1947-1948 J&K operations was the precursor of the betrayal card when India's government of the day betrayed the nation's army by deliberately creating the Kashmir problem via a duplicitous ceasefire.
Come 1962 and our leaders sent the army to fight the Chinese at freezing altitudes armed with only one weapon -- courage; another betrayal. The aftermath of the 1965 and 1971 Indo- Pakistani wars must go down in India's history as the epitome of the civilian controlling authority's "exemplary" betrayal of our men in uniform.
Operations Blue Star and Pawan, the Siachen fiasco, Kargil and its consequences, and the latest incidents where our current Army Chief's statement at his press conference was promptly sabotaged by our government due to American pressure, and the removal of our army's strike corps commander under specious circumstances all exemplify just one horrific truth: Betrayal of the soldier by our political leaders to suit their own gameplan.
Betrayal does not appropriate itself along a reasoning line in that the politicians who careen above this line use betrayal as a matter of choice while the uniformed community that lie below the line are required to abide by the moral values ingrained in them by the founding fathers of modern India's armed forces and treat betrayal as an "occupational hazard". This cannot work since the context is one where lives are at stake, lives of our precious soldiers.
How long can this unequal equation last? Not for long, that is for sure. The present-day service officer is a totally different entity from the martinet of yore -- he is infinitely more aware, more articulate, and more demanding of his superiors than ever before. There is a tendency to restrict this characteristic to solely within the servicemen. This is misplaced. At higher echelons of military command and staff, the incumbents expect top rate leaders from their civilian masters.
By comparison, a cursory look at India's civilian equivalent makes one hugely sceptical. Professionalism has been pushed aside by politicization in our civilian component. Any politician, even if he cannot spell the word "Defense", can become the head of India's defense set-up. One such defense minister sat on the promotion files of Major General to Lieutenant General for 10 months, thus negating qualified officers from being promoted because of the age bar rule, simply to push through an unqualified kinsman of his.
Pakistan provides an excellent sample of the truism, "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". Gen. Jehangir Karamat who was Pervez Musharraf's predecessor as Army Chief, belonged to the old school. He, however, fell out with his Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and ultimately opted for the honorable exit by putting in his papers. The Prime Minister -- worse luck -- tried his usual bossiness with Musharraf when the latter succeeded Karamat. Unfortunately for Sharif, it backfired because Musharraf subscribed to the "new school". There is surely a message in this for India!