Fort William, Calcutta, is not headless anymore now that the vacant post of General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Eastern Command, has finally been filled by the appointment of Lt Gen H.R.S. Kalkat late on Monday night. Yet another sorry spectacle of courts determining the course of what should ordinarily have been a routine appointment has been enacted. The Army has of course been shown in poor light, what with a Lt General making a plea before the learned judiciary seeking the appointment. It is bad enough that the courts are teeming with uniformed personnel seeking promotions, but a Lt Gen aspiring for a particular appointment is an altogether different phenomenon.It took the Supreme Court to bring the curtain down on this pitiable performance. But the matter does not, and cannot be allowed to rest here, for the show will once again be enacted sometime in the future. The coalescence of patently partisan interests of a Defence Minister and the strange stakes of the stagehands brought ignominy on Indiaand its military. The minister has since retreated into the riverines of Gangetic politics, but the back- room boys are still around, unaccountable, unrepentant and unscathed by the episode. Despite the fact that blatant subversion of regulations was the rule of the day in MoD, not one official guilty of creating this situation has been taught legal lessons. And this, once again, brings forth the very basic question - what role does the Ministry of Defence play?During the run up to this judicial intervention the Ministry of Defence played an as partial a role as that of its former minister. It violated its own rules, on paper, and it lobbied, unashamed, in the manner of its chief executive. Government of India regulations were abused in the pursuit of a blatantly casteist agenda, and in that effort bureaucratic MoD conducted itself as shamelessly as its political head. Without batting an eyelid the mandarins played along in this charade of the speechless. They mortgaged judgment and advice at the altar ofservitude and schema. So what then is the function of the MoD when it fosters such brazen desecration of the rule of law? There are significant lessons to be learnt from this latest enaction of bureaucratic absurdity. This case is more critical for one incomparable objective, and that is the imposition of an ineligible C-in-C in an operational command. The Army is today stretched between demands of counter insurgency operations in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-eastern states. In any military venture the determinant of success is leadership, and only after that comes the quality of hardware. And these are the only contests, however perilous they may be, where no silver medals are awarded. There is only victory, or the ignominy of defeat. Therefore, the illegality of the MoD exercise was doubled in danger by the fact that they wanted to place an officer who was plainly ineligible to hold the post. His record of service just did not fit the bill. The danger lay in that this officer would not have had the moralcommand of the troops fighting, and dying, in his theatre. There is simply no substitute to righteous authority. And yet not one official thought it fit that the most appropriate leadership be placed in command of the Eastern Army. The MoD indulged, and participated, in the fancies of its minister's peculiar brand of politics. The efficacy of military operations in the east never once remained the prime concern amongst the decision makers. So what were they doing? And should they be allowed to remain unchecked when it is likely that given an opportunity the same would happen again?It is fairly obvious that accountability has to be imposed on the MoD, for there is nothing to suggest that such convictions exist in the eastern corridors of South Block. The lessons that have been learnt from this affair must be exercised. There is every reason why the faceless in the MoD must be made to bear the brunt of their own creation. The subterfuge that was being attempted by the bureaucracy must not be allowed to gounanswered. For so long now such conduct has been condoned, and the net result is plain to the eye. Justice is not just an aspiration, it has also to be seen to be prevailing, and applied. Otherwise the curtains will go up for another performance.
