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How the Services lost the War

Major General Ashok K Mehta traces the background leading to Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat's dismissal last month.

A puzzled President K R Narayanan received Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on a grey December day. The meeting had been sought by the CNS. Though Narayanan thought he knew why, he waited for the CNS to tell him.

Scheduled to be a 20-minute meeting, it went on for 90. Although the CNS went home that day a considerably more relieved man, the meeting only served to fuel further the speculation that the government was considering sending the CNS home. As indeed it happened on December 30, the first time a chief of staff has ever been sacked in India.

Several ministers confirmed that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was "deeply unhappy" at the public laundering of dirty linen by Bhagwat after his run-in with Defence Secretary Ajit Kumar, who was transferred on December 30. Newsrooms in Delhi got anonymous notes about the goings on in the Indian Navy. Much of this mail made much of trivia: How the defence secretary had questioned the purchase of floor tiles which the naval chief had purchased for his office, how the naval chief had struck the defence secretary's name off the list of invitees for the Navy Day party and had agreed to invite him sulkily only after Defence Minister George Fernandes ordered him to...

However, the real reason for the sudden activity in South Block was actually a much more serious matter. The CNS had told the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet that an order issued by it was 'unimplementable', effectively telling the government that it was not the ministry of defence -- MoD -- or the government but the CNS who should decide who his deputy chief of naval staff was going to be. He had a point, but the selection process doesn't end there.

Bhagwat had called on his Supreme Commander, the President of India, to explain his stand. And soon after, he was available for interviews on Doordarshan and TVi, for reporters and editors, to give his views on how India should be run.

Retired admirals told each other that the Indian Navy had earned a singular distinction: it was no longer the silent force.

India has become a nuclear weapons state. It has the fifth-largest, most battle-hardened and apolitical fighting force in the world. Since the mid-1980s, it has been fighting proxy wars in borders states. But maturity seems to elude it.

Last month, the in-house proxy wars were at their peak: the MoD versus the services, intra-service and inter-service. One of the most stable pillars of democracy is starting to groan and grunt.

1998 will be remembered as yet another benchmark in the evolution of the armed forces, marked as it was by the mini revolution in the IAF and discord in the navy.

The central message of the cannon fired by Bhagwat against the bows of the government is three-fold: the existing higher defence management structures and the chain of command have collapsed, the services can no longer tolerate the civilian bureaucratic stranglehold masquerading as civilian political control, and the country's courts are getting to have more and more say in military command functions. And soldiers have just lost faith in the system.

This collective breakdown was inevitable. Implicit in Bhagwat's guarded act of defiance: the ACC's order to appoint Vice-Admiral Harinder Singh is 'not implementable' was the signal for the government not to take the military for granted. In the past, service chiefs have sent out similar messages but it was routinely ignored.

Addressing IAS probationers at Mussoorie in November, Chief of Army Staff General Ved Malik blasted the prevalent system for its red tape, archaic procedures and lack of financial and operational autonomy for service chiefs who are responsible for fighting the armed forces. His is the umpteenth voice in this familiar chorus of protest. It is ironic such protest has come at the time of a BJP-led government which came to power promising to champion the cause of soldiers afflicted by prolonged neglect, bureaucratic interference and marginalisation in defence policy-making.

The seeds of the deformed national security and defence architecture, and mistrust in civil-military relations were sown at the time of Independence when the British Indian armed forces were converting from an imperial garrison of a theatre command to a national army. The origin of these uncivil relations is the oft-quoted dispute between C-in-C Kitchner and Viceroy Curzon. The insistence by Curzon to introduce an additional member in his executive council to exercise financial control was opposed by Kitchner. 150 years later, the legacy of that dispute lingers.

Except for Subhas Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi who did not survive the aftermath of Independence, India's political leaders lacked military experience. Their single-biggest fear, patently unfounded, was a military coup. The existing army department was turned first into the department of defence and later the MoD. At the time, defence secretary H M Patel and his successor twice offered to integrate the service headquarters with MoD. But General Rajindersinhji and General K S Thimayya refused, fearing they would lose operational command and the panoply of pomp and pageantry by joining the ministerial whirlpool.

Soon, the army got fully involved in J&K, Junagadh, Hyderabad and Goa operations. While their prestige rose, their clout gradually declined. It was not even consulted in deciding crucial operational issues. Civilian bureaucracy, in cahoots with the political leadership, cut the services down to size. The generals were careless and naïve not to notice the diminution in their stature and status. But the civilian bureaucracy at once grasped the import of civilian control and went about following a policy of divide and rule: keeping divided the three wings of the armed forces and parrying proposals of their integration with the ministry, not without assistance from the services themselves.

The higher military leadership of that time was browbeaten or simply forced to accept the supremacy of civilian bureaucratic authority and political interference in its internal affairs. The noose around the services kept tightening in parallel control -- superimposed with an additional layer of financial checks -- over major aspects of organisation, administration and operational readiness.

From the stunning decline in the Warrant of Precedence to the erosion of financial and operational autonomy, the decline corroded promotions, postings, ceremonial functions and, lately, even distribution of canteen profits. At one stage, the MoD asked to scrutinise promotion exams and was told it was a professional matter. In short, MoD gradually commandeered power, leaving the services with just the trappings of dwindling pageantry. At no stage did the services stand up to be counted.

Today, the subject of promotions and appointments is a hot potato. Lieutenant-generals, vice-admirals and air marshals are locked in combat in courts, challenging the authority of service chiefs, MoD and even the ACC. The beginnings of this mess can be traced to 1956 with the brazen style of then defence minister V K Krishna Menon. The landmark was the two vacancies for promotion to Lt-General CoAS General Thimayya forwarded just two names in order of seniority -- Major Generals P P Kumaramangalam and P S Gyani.

Krishna Menon wanted B M Kaul promoted. So the ministry persuaded Thimayya to send three names. The government approved Kumaramangalam and Kaul, overlooking Gyani who had not commanded a division which was a prerequisite for promotion to Lt-General.

And this is how the government set the precedent of asking the services to forward names in excess of the stipulated vacancies for a wider selection. Krishna Menon was a thorn in the side of the services. He foisted B M (Bijji) Kaul on Thimayya as chief of general staff, forcing the latter to resign. Unfortunately, Nehru persuaded Thimayya to recall his resignation. And the services have lived unhappily ever after.

The next stand-off between the civil and military authority was in 1992, when army chief General S F Rodrigues called some foreign countries 'bandicoots' and also called for Good Governance. Brandishing the copy of the offending interview in Parliament, present defence minister George Fernandes demanded General Rodrigues's scalp. Despite wide public and media support, General Rodrigues chickened out instead of sticking to his comments and offering to resign. He had to give a written apology which was read out by the defence minister in Parliament. General Rodrigues has been rewarded with a place on the National Security Advisory Board.

'Yeh General banega'

Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine

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