Enough is enough

The Vishnu Bhagwat affair is getting murkier by the hour thanks to official attempts to justify the sacking of the admiral. It was to be ...

The Vishnu Bhagwat affair is getting murkier by the hour thanks to official attempts to justify the sacking of the admiral. It was to be expected that the government would thrash around for explanations for a decision that is hard to support on any rational grounds. It is particularly distressing to see the prime minister himself doing his bit to sow confusion on the morning after. His statements from Port Blair do nothing to improve the credibility of the government. If the dispute over the posting of Vice Admiral Harinder Singh was a relatively minor issue, the country still needs to know what reasons of state influenced the government’s decision. Innuendo will not do.

Apparently there was defiance of the civilian authority on a “sustained basis” going back to August, according to Atal Behari Vajpayee. To reinforce the argument, BJP president Kushabhau Thakre sets the date back to 1991 and allies in the Akali Dal chip in with charges of communalism. This is all becoming quite ridiculous. Here is acase, allegedly, of serious misdemeanours and the politicians are busy embellishing it with no respect for the truth or thought to the consequences.

One is asked to believe that the integrity of the Indian Navy was being affected, the Defence Ministry was aware of this for many months and had brought it to the attention of the prime minister on a number of occasions. Evidently this is a post-facto reconstruction of events. Were it otherwise, a number of intermediate steps would have been taken. But neither the prime minister nor defence minister considered it necessary to summon Admiral Bhagwat to get his side of the picture. There is no indication that serious thought was given to long-standing complaints of serving chiefs of staff about the distorted lines of communication between them and the political authority. On the contrary, there is evidence that the government relied unduly on inputs from civilian officers in the Ministry of Defence whose impartiality has been questioned by a court of law.Finally, if the admiral was the core problem why was it necessary to show a lack of confidence in defence secretary Ajit Kumar by transferring him to another job on the same day? If anything, it has exposed the chinks in the government’s defence.There is something terribly familiar about the mishandling of this case: precipitate action based on insufficient understanding followed by damage control which makes a bad situation much worse. Notice also the tunnel vision and high-minded noises. The government can see one thing and one only: civilian control of the armed forces. It is clutching desperately to this principle even though no official statement has yet established that it was seriously threatened. Need we remind the defence minister and national security adviser that this is India, not some tin-pot republic where every growl from brass hats should send civilians scurrying for cover. Enough is enough. The government should either come out with a credible explanation which will hold up to public scrutinyor hold its peace and do whatever is required to repair the damage to its reputation and the image of the armed forces.