A few months ago, when asked if he had given unofficial legal advice to Chief of Army Staff, General VK Singh on his date of birth, top lawyer Ram Jethmalani replied in the affirmative. When asked what his advice had been, he said: “I told him that the legal date is the first one”.
The first one? The fact is, General Singh has two sets of dates of birth. And this is the reason he has become the first ever Chief of Army Staff in India to petition to the government that he is actually younger than the records say, he is.
Ah, but which records ? In the Army, the Adjutant General is the keeper of official records. The date of birth he has for General Singh is May 10 , 1951. This is also the date on his school-leaving certificate. But according to the Military Secretary who handles postings and promotions, VK Singh was born on May 10, 1950.
How could this have happened? According to Singh he wrote several times to former Chiefs of Army Staff, General JJ Singh and General Deepak Kapoor that a discrepancy in his date of birth exists and this should be aligned. Neither Chief took any action. According to correspondence within government, in 2006 before he became Corps Commander and Army Commander, General Singh accepted in writing that he was born in 1950. Singh says he did nothing of the sort.
If he is made to retire on 31 May 2012 (the end of the month when he turns 62) Singh believes his honour will be compromised. He has told several serving and retired officers that it is honour he is fighting for and points to a conspiracy against him in which are involved two former Chiefs of Army Staff (one against whom he has ordered action on grounds of graft and is not on talking terms with); and civilian IAS officers in the Ministry of Defence (MoD). If the government accepts his reasoning and lets him serve till next year, this decision will fly in the face of all the legal advice that it has got, including from Attorney General GE Vahanvati on the subject. All the advisors say General Singh’s correct date of birth is 10 May, 1950. Presumably this is on the basis of the undertaking — that Singh says he never signed.
The officer corps of the Indian Army is divided into two sets of people. One believes Gen Singh should hang in there and fight — even if it means taking the matter to court. At the back of this stream of opinion is a mountain of resentment at real and imagined slights borne at the hands of a civilian bureaucracy: the steady slide down in the Warrant of Precedence over the years; the levers of power juggled by the MoD when it comes to courses and foreign trips abroad; and the slow rage of a corps of officers, trained and schooled only to take orders from senior officers, not some potbellied Tom, Dick or Harish, sitting in some plush office pushing files.
But there is only one word to describe the reaction of a large number of officers, serving and retired: they are appalled. They feel it is unseemly for a COAS — at whose word, soldiers are ready to go into battle even when death is certain — to quibble over whether he should get another few months to serve. Why did he wait till he became Chief to rake this up? They ask. Worse, there are suggestions that a political game is afoot — PILs being filed from Rohtak, General VK Singh’s home town, amid suspicions that it is a command performance, his meetings with political leaders including Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, even if only to complain about the behaviour of the Department of Expenditure shooting down acquisition plans of the Indian Army… all this is totally unacceptable not just to old school but many younger serving officers.
Sources close to Mukherjee say that when the word ‘honour’ was mentioned at their meeting at the end of December, Mukherjee’s advice to General Singh was: “don’t disobey an order from the government by going to court”. This is what the rule-book says: In India, the Army is under civilian control and the civilian leadership is the government of the day.
But, it is possible that General Singh might be persuaded by his well-wishers to tell the government its orders are ‘unimplementable’. After all, there is a precedent for this. In 1999, Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat was asked to appoint Vice Admiral Harinder Singh as Deputy Chief of Naval Staff by the Union Cabinet. He said the Cabinet’s orders were unimplementable. He was removed from his post and Admiral Sushil Kumar appointed Navy Chief instead. Bhagwat was not, it could be argued, fighting for himself. He was fighting for a principle. General VK Singh claims he is fighting for honour.
But at the end of the day, history teaches us that it teaches us nothing.
