Armed forces remiss, discipline amiss

From the Olympian mess that the Indian Olympic Association has made — and for which the International Olympic Committee has suspended it — to politicians in power or with clout shooting with impunity anyone, including police inspectors on crime scenes, the country is replete with intolerable monstrosities.

But the Indian state and society seem to have lost the capacity to control these. No wonder Shiv Sainiks in Mumbai would not allow the authorities to remove from the wrong spot a “temporary” memorial to Bal Thackeray. In Delhi, five patients can be virtually murdered at a trauma centre for want of oxygen. Come to think of it, the eviction from the Maldives of GMR, an Indian company with a 25-year contract to run the airport at Male, hasn’t added, but done the opposite, to the prestige of the region’s pre-eminent power.
However, I don’t intend to discuss any of these episodes but a problem, which in some ways is more embarrassing because it focuses on occasional statements of top military leaders that are not even in sync with the government’s policy. Yet, here again, the powers that be have done precious little to stem the trend.
To be sure the malaise is not new but has festered over long years. The only time a service chief who was also Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee attracted adverse notice from the government was at the time of the Sixth Pay Commission. For, while making a legitimate complaint about the commission’s treatment of the armed forces, he went too far and even sent an open signal to the men of the Navy.
What has happened in the last few days is more disturbing. On the very day the world heard of China’s escalation of its cartographic row with this country by printing on its e-passports its map claiming Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin as parts of its territory (something they had done never before), the newspapers also displayed a statement by the Chief of the Army Staff, Gen. Bikram Singh, to the effect that India-China relations were “absolutely perfect”. Could anything have been more incongruous than that?
Especially, when the news item about the ground reality also stated that India had responded to the Chinese provocation in a calibrated manner by including an outline of the authentic Indian map in the visas stamped on the relevant Chinese passports.
Let two other pertinent facts be underscored. First, the Chinese map on its electronic passports also claimed all the waters and disputed islands of the South China Sea as its own, and Southeast Asian countries, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, had protested strongly. Secondly, this was not the first time that China had asserted its sovereignty over the South China Sea and declared it as one of its “core interests”, together with Taiwan and Tibet. At the East Asia Summit only some weeks ago, the outgoing Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, had done so with gusto.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took the opportunity to spell out Indian policy on the South China Sea with commendable clarity and dignity. The sovereignty over a sea, he said, had to be decided in accordance with international law, respect for free navigation in international waters and settlement of any dispute among neighbours through peaceful negotiations.
Against this backdrop what happened because of the new Navy Chief Adm. D.K. Joshi’s statement at a press conference on the eve of the Navy Day (December 3), and which elicited a rejoinder by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign office could have been avoided. However, here some allowances must be made. The admiral has just taken over as the head of his service and was presiding over his first Navy Day. He was asked a rather loaded question about this country’s ability to cope with China’s aggressiveness over the South China Sea and he naturally wanted to emphasise that the Navy could fully safeguard all the country’s maritime interests. Unfortunately, unlike his predecessors, he did so in a language that could have been less strident.
As it happened the national security adviser (NSA), Shivshankar Menon, was in Beijing for a last meeting with his Chinese counterpart and special representative for boundary talks, Dai Bingguo, who is retiring in March after having held 15 rounds of negotiations with three successive Indian NSAs. Obviously, the Chinese side took up the matter with him and in New Delhi the ministry of external affairs questioned the admiral. This has aroused a reaction among the retired maritime fraternity. A former Navy Chief, Sushil Kumar, has indeed accused the government of “timidity” in dealing with China.
This is a very depressing state of affairs, but in apportioning responsibility for it one must be even-handed. The political leadership is as remiss as some of the military leaders have been. It is the right, indeed the duty, of top military leaders to press their appraisal of and views on national security on the government, but public statements on relations with foreign powers must be left to the political leaders.
Sadly, the latter also are lagging in doing their job. A.K. Antony, during the second longest tenure as defence minister, next only to Jagjivan Ram’s, has little to show for his stewardship. He could have deterred Gen. V. K. Singh, the previous Army Chief, from breaking the Indian Army’s 300-year-old tradition of the Chief never going to court against the government, and that too on such a trivial matter as his date of birth. But the minister didn’t do so even after the Supreme Court passed a stricture, reminding the general that after giving in writing more than once that the birth date controversy was closed, he had agitated the issue again. No wonder the ex-Chief went berserk even while in service, and is now planning to gherao Parliament. Mercifully, the idea did not occur to him while he was still leading the Army. Isn’t it time to apply the brakes?