Relying exclusively on “legal opinion”, as the government appears to have done, and bidding goodbye to common sense, is seldom advisable. This is what the Manmohan Singh government has done and driven Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh to move the Supreme Court over his date of birth issue.
To most level-headed people (clearly not those giving the government legal advice), Gen. Singh has a case with some merit. His school-leaving certificate — and other documents that testify to his date of birth — says he was born in May 1951, and not in the same month the previous year, as the government stubbornly maintains. Combined with the fact that in Gen. Singh we have after a considerable gap an Army Chief whose personal integrity is seen as shining in a world of collapsing moral values, as evidenced by his conduct and intervention in a variety of cases in the service he leads, the government’s action seems like it simply doesn’t care about honest men.
The government is relying on a form filled by Gen. Singh when he was 14 or 15, wherein he mistakenly wrote 1950 instead of 1951, a mistake that was apparently corrected later. The common perception in a roomful of good men and women would be that if there are two contending documents attesting to the same fact, give the benefit of the doubt to the person in question, if he has a good moral standing, rather than to the government or a corporate entity. Smart politicians would see this rightaway, as they deal in the public pulse every day. In any case, most times everyone knows what’s right and what’s not. So it’s a pity a stalwart politician like defence minister A.K. Antony, who also has an enviable reputation for personal probity, fell for the bait of “legal advice” and didn’t assert his basic good sense.
Gen. Singh has made it clear he merely wishes to have his word believed, not have his tenure extended by insisting on 1951 as the point of reference. This is a further plus for him and a minus for the government. No Army Chief in India has challenged the government in a court of law before. That fuels interest in the case, though it is clear this is not an Army versus government matter, but one of individual grievance, as the Chief himself has noted. That is a saving grace. Even now there is time. The government can pull back before the Supreme Court delivers
judgment.