All eyes on supreme commander

While the so-called Rahul Gandhi bombshell, apropos “ordinance is nonsense”, has seized the national discourse and has long-term implications for the political scenario that will shape the governance of the country, the more damaging issue in relation to national security that merits objective scrutiny is what may be termed the General VK Singh controversy.

It may be recalled that a national daily (Indian Express, September 20) made a dramatic revelation about a confidential report submitted by Army HQ to the Ministry of Defence in March this year which inter-alia alleged that former Army Chief, General VK Singh, had misused secret intelligence funds to de-stabilise the elected government in Jammu and Kashmir.

In the following days, there has been a series of public statements and clarifications offered by the former Chief, which, in turn, has led to an explosive debate in the national audio-visual media by his well-wishers and detractors that has only served to vitiate the discourse and, thereby, caused both embarrassment and damage to India’s image and security interests.

At the heart of this controversy is a statement made by VK Singh, who, while defending himself, alleged that Army funds were used to pay certain politicians in J&K to ‘stabilize’ the region — and furthermore, that this was a practice that dates back to the dawn of Indian independence. The enormity and preposterous import of this statement — for those who heard it live on TV — is self-evident. To characterize this as a jaw-dropping revelation is an under-statement.

Some correction was attempted by VK Singh who sought to clarify the content and context of his remarks but the damage was done. Was the allegation made by the former Army Chief true? If so, has India been guilty of the most heinous and hypocritical charge of nurturing a sham democracy in J&K — and the extrapolation is that Kashmir was indeed under the jackboot of the Indian army. This, incidentally, is the core of what India has long maintained in relation to Pakistan — namely that it is Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) that is still under the tight control of the Pakistan Army.

Mercifully, this allegation has been refuted by every former Indian Army Chief and in a joint statement (September 27), eight former Generals asserted that ‘no funds were ever provided by the Army, to any politician, political party or NGO in their tenures and nor would they have allowed that’. They further added to allay any anxiety that “the Indian Army is completely apolitical and that they do not dabble in politics and the Army takes great pride in this time honoured tradition.”

While this latest statement by the former Army Chiefs may offer some palliative, the VK Singh controversy needs to be reviewed in its entirety for it reveals certain abiding institutional infirmities in the higher defence management of the country. Civil-military relations in India have been less than appropriate and this is a trait that goes back to the Nehru years. The run-up to the 1962 war with China is a case in point.

At the time, the political direction to national security was less than objective and the most undesirable form of factionalism within the Army was nurtured by the then Defence Minister Krishna Menon. Consequently, negligence to an unfolding challenge to national security was the leitmotif of that decade. The debacle of October 1962 followed and it compelled the then President S Radhakrishnan to chastise PM Nehru for rank ‘negligence and credulity’. The Supreme Commander of the Indian Armed Forces made the appropriate post-facto intervention within the Constitutional framework and encouraged a shattered PM to apply the corrective to the higher defence matrix.

One could argue that a similar situation currently prevails, in that the challenges to national security have become complex and urgent and the VK Singh episode is symptomatic of the systemic inadequacies that need to be objectively reviewed and corrected. The need for a radical overhaul of India’s higher defence management was palpable in the aftermath of the 1999 Kargil war and it is a shame that 14 years later, little substantive progress has been made. Both the NDA and UPA governments are culpable of having neglected this issue and in many ways, the VK Singh episode is a result of this negligence.

What began as a totally avoidable date-of-birth controversy soon snowballed into an ugly situation wherein the Army Chief was petitioning the Supreme Court for redress since the political executive was unable to deal with the matter. At the time there were unseemly insinuations about factions within the Army and selective leaks to the media about shaping the line of succession to the post of Army Chief.

In early 2012, more leaks in the media followed that hinted at General VK Singh attempting a coup by moving military formations towards Delhi — again a preposterous charge — and the matter was allowed to fester without any firm resolution by the political establishment. More turbulence was in store, for towards the end of his tenure in mid 2012, a secret missive from General VK Singh to the Prime Minister found its way into the public domain and a slew of charges and counter-charges filled the air. Again, the matter remained suspended and an aggrieved VK Singh went into retirement.

The nation was hoping that this matter had been buried but, regrettably, the latest mid-September revelations about VK Singh seeking to topple an elected government, amongst other grave charges that have deep import for national security, have opened the Pandora’s Box again. Given the uncertain political environment within the country — and the ordinance fiasco has only served to exacerbate matters — is there a case to review the role of the President? Should all eyes be upon the Supreme Commander only on the ceremonial occasion of January 26? The present incumbent of Rashtrapati Bhawan has an unmatched insight into the challenges to national security and could perhaps burnish the track record of his illustrious predecessor of 1962.

The author is former director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses