Despite the clear delineation of the line of command between India’s civil and military leadership, a clash of egos between chiefs of staff (CoS) and senior civil servants has been a recurrent problem for India’s political leadership since the days of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Many an army general has clashed with a defence secretary and vice versa. Sometimes the armed forces leadership has directly clashed with the political leadership. Such differences of opinion are understandable and should normally be handled through established codes of civil-military conduct. It is, however, regrettable that a purely administrative and institutional matter pertaining to the procedure for ascertaining the date of birth, and hence the longevity of tenure, of Army Chief General V K Singh, is being sought to be politicised by General Singh. His public statements, and some recent statements by other senior defence staff, are clearly outside the acceptable norms of conduct, given India’s civil-military relationship. General Singh has every right to petition and seek a change of his date of birth, but he also has the duty to adhere to existing systems and not have them questioned in the name of civil-military jurisdiction and raising questions about public support for one institution or another. The government is duty-bound to take a view based on established procedure and that should be the last word. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did well not to entertain the politicisation of this issue by a group of members of Parliament who sought to submit a memorandum on behalf of the army chief.
Though the army chief is clearly in the wrong on the manner in which he has been lobbying his case and deserves to be upbraided for his attempt to invoke the name of Anna Hazare, the fact also remains that the civil and political leadership in the Union defence ministry has failed to respond to the needs and hopes of the armed forces. More importantly, the mindless bureaucratism and file-pushing proceduralism that have come to grip the Union defence ministry in recent years have also contributed to a souring of civil-military relations. Other developed country democracies offer a larger role to their armed forces leadership in policy making. In India the obsessive and jealous guarding of turf by joint secretaries and lesser officials in the defence and foreign ministries has resulted in shutting out, or stunting the role of, armed forces leadership in national security planning, strategic policy making and military diplomacy. While successive national security advisors seem to have understood the new policy role that chiefs of staff must play, the defence ministry remains a laggard. Perhaps the time has come to develop a new framework for civil-military relations so that the armed forces are re-assured and the talent within the forces is used more effectively in national security, defence and diplomacy.
