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Growing Military Assertion

What has made the country’s military top brass increasingly more forceful vis-à-vis the civilian authority?

Increasingly, in recent times, factional feuds within the Indian

Army and the hand of the Ministry of Defence in these rivalries,

as also public assertions of the top brass of the armed

forces on policy matters are being played out in the mainstream

media. A front page sensationally headlined story in the Indian

Express (4 April 2012) of unauthorised troop movements near

the capital on 16 January and how this “spooked” the government

is certainly an instance of journalistic overplay. The suggestion

is that Chief of Army Staff General V K Singh is supposed

to have engineered the troop movements to coincide with the

fi ling of his affi davit in the Supreme Court that contested the

Ministry of Defence’s claim that he was born in 1950, and not in

1951 as in the Army’s personnel records. The general, it seems,

wanted to “spook” the government for insisting on pensioning

him a year earlier than he thought his retirement was due!

Predictably, Defence Minister A K Antony rubbished the news

report as “totally baseless”. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

described it as “alarmist” and the army chief himself termed it as

“fables of a sick mind”. But the general’s claim to be younger than

he was shown in the fi rst records, the government’s bid to retire

him on the basis of these and not later records, the subsequent

allegations about an attempt to bribe him, and many other sordid

details that are now tumbling out may have more to do with struggles

in the top echelons of the Indian state over access to riches.

The armed forces have been modernising and technologically

upgrading their arsenal since the late 1990s, and have been

demanding greater allocation of funds from the public exchequer.

In this, they have been aided by the fact that the Congress-led

United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is as obsessed

as its earlier Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic

Alliance counterpart that nothing should be left undone in

preparing them to be able to simultaneously go to war, if necessary,

against Pakistan and China. And, one cannot ignore the

destructive involvement of the Army in Kashmir and in parts of

the north-east against sections of our very own people.

In the pursuit of this multiple agenda of destruction and the

creation of waste, the military has come to preside over an ever

larger resource base and its leadership is beginning to feel a

greater sense of its own importance. That in the present setting

the military top brass would be roused and would brace itself to

assert its power vis-à-vis the country’s civilian leadership was

only to be expected. Indeed, in the matter of publicly voicing

their opposition to any amendments of the Armed Forces

(Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), the Disturbed Areas Act, or Section

197(2) of the Criminal Procedure Code to dilute provisions

providing immunity from prosecution, whether in Kashmir or

the north-east, or to proposals to lift the “disturbed area” tag in

certain districts, the leaders of the Army have been tacitly

encouraged by their civilian-political bosses to do so.

The armed forces leadership has, however, got out of hand in

certain instances. Recall that in the aftermath of Washington’s

illegal raid in Abbottabad in Pakistan in which United States

military personnel assassinated Osama bin Laden, two of the

top brass of our armed forces boasted that our forces also have

the capability and the competence to undertake such commando

operations in another country to eliminate terrorists. And on a

number of occasions in the past decade successive army chiefs

have publicly spoken about “winning” a nuclear war against

Pakistan and more recently about a new “Cold Start” doctrine

for a limited and destructive war with our western neighbour.

The leaders of the armed forces can, however, prove more sensible

and prudent than the political leadership where they perceive

that their interests may be harmed. In 2009, the Congress

Party led-UPA government wanted the Indian Army’s Rashtriya

Rifl es and the Indian Air Force to take part – along with the

Border Security Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, and

the Central Reserve Police Force – in what came to be called

Operation Green Hunt, the unprecedentedly huge, multi-state,

armed offensive against the Maoists. But the military differed

with the government; it prevailed upon the civilian-political leadership

and instead opted to provide logistical support, training in

jungle warfare, and take a leading part in the formulation of the

military strategy of the paramilitary forces.

Yes, money, irrespective of how it is gained, is also at stake,

for India is now the world’s largest importer of armaments. It

is reported that in the Tatra deal, which is presently being

enquired into by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the public

sector undertaking Bharat Earth Movers (BEML), in true comprador

style, insisted on purchasing the trucks from the Londonbased

non-resident Indian Ravinder Rishi’s fi rm instead of

contracting with the Czech manufacturer which repeatedly

tried to persuade BEML to directly deal with it. Be that as it may,

India’s strategic alliance with the US has instilled in the top

brass of the armed forces a sense of their own signifi cance, and

an ascendancy in the hierarchy of power that they could not

have even dreamed of. The US presently holds more military

exercises with India than with any other power. And, in this

part of the world, control of the Indian Ocean is what Washington

is focusing upon, and here it is the Indian Navy that is

involved in cooperation with its US counterpart.

Little wonder then that the country’s military leadership is

now increasingly more assertive vis-à-vis the civilian authority