by Bharat Karnad
In his letter to the Supreme Court opposing the
army chief, General VK Singh’s case for relevant official records to show his
correct date of birth, Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati referred to a
mysterious ‘succession plan’ that he said the authorities were determined to
protect. The so-called ‘succession plan’ has validity only if the government of
India first acknowledges that it has outsourced the selection of chief of army
staff to a couple of former army chiefs. If such is the case, then it is a most
alarming development and it is surprising it has drawn so little attention.
Whatever the merits of this
succession plan, it is predicated on a basic fact of military life, namely
that, all other things being equal, the reigning service chief decides the fate
of three star-rank officers by assigning or, for whatever reasons of his own,
denying them prize posts. The defence minister and his ministry, in this
situation, act as mere rubber stamps. To cite an example from some two decades
back, the finest armoured commander the Indian Army has produced, the
no-nonsense Lieutenant General Hanut Singh, was never made army commander, in
the main, because his seniors and colleagues who had had enough of his
outspokenness, branded him ‘Chaplain General’ for his religious rituals carried
out privately on his time, and sidetracked his career. Hanut ended up as
commandant, Armoured Corps Centre and School, Ahmednagar. The defence minister
at the time, K C Pant, recalls that the Army hierarchy was dead set against
Hanut being given theatre command, which opposition, he says, he could not
ignore.
Without getting into too much
detail, the saga in the present case enters the critical stage with the freshly
minted Lieutenant General Vijay Kumar Singh being handed command of the
prestigious II Corps in 2006, which required his prior acquiescence in, as far
as he was concerned, the wrong birth-date. It pushed him into first of the
three significant compromises he willingly made when he could have, but did
not, condition his successive promotions and acceptance of commands (ad
seriatim, as general officer commanding — II Corps, general
officer-commanding-in-chief, Eastern Command, and finally COAS) on the Military
Secretary’s Office modifying its records to show 1951 as his year of birth,
which he had steadfastly maintained from the time of his commissioning. He can
be faulted for ‘over-weaning ambition’ for instead accepting the ambiguous
promises made by the serving chiefs of staff, Generals J J Singh in 2006 and
Deepak Kapoor in 2008 when last V K Singh took command of the Eastern Army,
that they would take care of business. Neither of them did, and the age issue
festered until now when it is a full-blown crisis that the Supreme Court will rule
on today. It, of course, did not help that V K Singh’s personal relations with
Kapoor, never very warm, chilled when the former succeeded in collaring the
latter’s adjutant general and confidante, Lieutenant General Avdesh Prakash, in
the Sukna land scam.
The beneficiary of General V K
Singh’s uncorrected date of birth, it turns out, is his successor at Eastern
Command, Lieutenant General Bikram Singh, who like him at the time he became
COAS, is the senior most serving officer in the army and putative army chief
should he retire as per the incorrect year of birth, by May-end 2012. The murky
and interesting part of the story is this: Assuming Bikram Singh was the man J
J Singh hoped, down the line, to install as army chief then the latter had the
motivation to disregard V K Singh’s protestations and keep the birth year
anomaly intact. No love lost between them, Kapoor had no reason to help V K
Singh resolve this problem either. In both instances, the serving COASs were
remiss in not acting in conformity with the Army ethos requiring the senior
officer to play scrupulously fair with and safeguard the interests of a junior
officer, especially with so much at stake for latter. This then was the
‘succession plan’. This plan insofar as it was ostensibly obtained by design,
premeditation, and careful calculation, raises the troubling issue about it
being allowed to supercede the government’s right to appoint a COAS. Put
another way, the question is should the government not have exercised its
exclusive right to appoint an officer of its choice, even alighting on Bikram
Singh if it so wished, rather than anointing someone pre-selected by a former
army chief as per a succession plan it was in the know of and decided to back?
It is an issue that’s at the heart of civilian control over the military in a
democracy.
The government decides on the
criterion to stress — merit or seniority — when filling high level posts. The
norm is for the person to be first chosen and for the selection criterion to be
trotted out later. Thus, Shyam Saran was elevated as foreign secretary, for
instance, on the basis of merit, but his successor, Nirupama Rao, was favoured
on the basis of seniority. To decide whom to appoint and why, is entirely the
government’s outlook and prerogative. It is the uncertainty attending on the
government’s decision that led Punjab politicians to canvas strongly with the
government for Lieutenant General J J Singh’s promotion as COAS in 2005. It is,
however, a dangerous precedent for the government to accede to an apparently
motivated selection by a former COAS. With Vahanvati going public with the
‘succession plan’, appointing Bikram Singh as COAS will reinforce the
impression of a government too dumb to see the stratagem behind the uncorrected
birth-year and too weak and distracted to select an army chief on its own.
On this issue as in others, A K
Antony is revealed as a defence minister who trusts his intuition and informed
judgement less but advice and notings on files by civil servants in his
ministry more. Politicians are supposed to be masters at instantly ‘reading’
people and situations. But Antony is showing himself as lacking in this basic
skill-set — bad advertisement for a supposedly strong political leader.
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