Ajai Shukla’s article “The threat within?” (Weekend, April 7) appears to be the most comprehensive and credible analysis of the events that started with the army troop movement towards the outskirts of Delhi on January 16. The publication of the report in a national daily on April 4 (more than two and a half months after the event) has sparked a feverish debate in which most commentators agreed that a military coup in the Indian context is unthinkable, and words like “baseless”, “alarmist” and “stupid” have been freely used to denounce such fears. However, one thing that cannot be gainsaid is that the government was jolted by the development, even as opinions may be divided on whether that was indeed the underlying intention of the army chief, whose confrontation with the government has been out in the open for the last few months.
Though all this points to the depths to which the trust deficit between the government and the army has sunk, there is a larger issue that the armed forces will do well to ponder. There is no dearth of cerebral officers in the military, as evident from the frequency and felicity with which many of them, after retirement, articulate their views on diverse issues with a bearing on national security in the print and electronic media. And they never miss an opportunity to bemoan the raw treatment that the military gets from the civilian dispensation, where the bureaucracy asserts its dominance at every stage and the political leadership is content with the status quo. However, the military will be the first to admit that such activism has achieved precious little in concrete terms.
It is logical then that the armed forces should look for other available options. The democratic set-up in the country offers an admirable opportunity in this context. If Yashwant Sinha, after retiring from the Indian Administrative Service, could plunge into politics to become the country’s finance minister and later minister of external affairs and continues to be a top leader of the BJP, what prevents a retired military officer from making it to the Union Cabinet and having a say in governance at the highest level?
P Chaganty, Mumbai
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