Wars within services

General Thimayya, Army Chief of Staff, was driven to resignation by such needling, an offer he was persuaded to withdraw to his later regret. The mutual suspicion between the defence minister and the armed forces, coupled withMenon’s favouritism, was to prove disastrous in 1962. Whatever his other achievements, the tenure of the “Tiger of Tea” was an object lesson in how not to be a defence minister.

Later defence ministers sensibly kept a lighter hand on the reins. But the ghost of Krishna Menon seemed to stride back into the Defence Ministry along with the United Front. Defence is so sensitive a topic that even journalists shied away from reporting all the follies that went on during Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tenure as defence minister. Nobody bothered, for instance, to investigate the rumour that the Samajwadi Party boss was pushing to give one of his caste-fellows an out-of-turn promotion. Frankly, it didn’t matter whether such an allegation was true; if officers believed the tale — as some undoubtedly did — the damage was done. Ambitious men decided that they too could play the game. We are now seeing the results.

Admiral Harinder Singh, who held the sensitive tri-service command in Port Blair, has openly accused the thenNavy Chief of Staff of being communal and politically biased when it came to promotions. He has specifically charged Admiral Bhagwat of being influenced by his wife, with dark hints of Communist leanings and Islamic parentage thrown in. Bhagwat himself retaliated by filing a contempt petition against Admiral Singh, then defence secretary Ajit Kumar, and joint secretary R.P. Bagai.

I am not singling out the Navy, possibly the most neglected of the three services. The Army is in no better shape judging by the ongoing battle between two claimants for the Eastern Command, H.R.S. Kalkat and R.S. Kadyan. As the matter is now in the Delhi High Court I won’t comment on the merits of the case, but the squabble certainly isn’t doing anything for the morale of the troops both seek to command.

How about the Air Force? Suffice it to say that a sizable section broke out in open mutiny — there is no other word for it — in the last months of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tenure. The ground crews’ demands for a better paypackage is still pending. To make matters worse, there are allegations that senior Air Force officers are involved in shady deals.

I freely admit that not all of these problems can be laid at Mulayam Singh Yadav’s doors. But it is also true that he did precious little to stem the rot and quite a bit, willingly or otherwise, to make the situation worse. In a sense, the Samajwadi Party president still hasn’t stopped playing politics with the defence establishment. Soon after Pokharan-II, Yadav announced that he himself was on the verge of permitting the tests when the Congress pulled the rug from under the United Front, a statement verified on the floor of the Lok Sabha by him. But at his party conclave a few weeks ago, the same man said the nuclear tests were a mistake!

(By the way, if Yadav’s original statement was true, India came dangerously close to a coup when Yadav was defence minister. I.K. Gujral flatly stated that no such proposal had been approved by the Union Cabinet. How did the United Frontdefence minister decide to take such a decision on his own?)

Clearing up the former defence minister’s sins of omission and commission will take quite a while. Some of the smaller decisions, such as sending proper equipment to the Siachen glacier, have already been taken. (Though it wasn’t, perhaps, quite so `small’ a matter for the much-tried men on the world’s highest battlefield). But personnel matters are not quite so easily resolved.

Bhagwat was not the only senior officer to have problems with the then defence secretary. His peers in the Army and the Air Force had independently complained to the Prime Minister that it was next to impossible to work with Ajit Kumar. It was rare to find such a degree of unanimity among the three services.

All this might have been ignored at other times as childish personality clashes. But such upheavals in the Indian defence establishment are causing concern elsewhere. Immediately after the Pokharan tests, some foreigners pointedly demanded whether India possessed aproper control and co-ordination system to ensure that nuclear weapons didn’t pass into the hands of some hothead. When senior officers squabble in open court and through the media, when there is undeniable evidence of bad blood between the civilians in the Defence Ministry and the men in the field, when there is mutiny over pay, those questions raised by experts from abroad take on some significance. You can’t dismiss them as just another example of occidental arrogance.

When Sunil Gavaskar was asked what advice he had for the Indian XI as New Zealand went into the last innings, he replied, “Get wickets!”, adding with a grin that it was simpler said than done. The obvious answers to the problems in the defence sector are to improve relations between the Defence Ministry and the three services, to restore discipline, and to ensure accountability. But that too is easy to say and tough to do.

A change in personnel at fairly senior levels isn’t going to cleanse the Augean stables of neglect (and worse),but it can’t hurt. I just wish it would be just as easy to completely exorcise the ghosts of Krishna Menon and Mulayam Singh Yadav from the Defence Ministry.