 "Bipin Rawat, Chief of army staff-designate")
A few days before the official announcement, when the Dehradun edition of Amar Ujala carried an item on the front page declaring that ‘Uttarakhand ka sapoot banega naya thal senadhyaksh’ (the new chief of army staff will be an Uttarakhand braveheart) with a picture of Gen Bipin Rawat, no one took it seriously in the belief that the government would never supersede two senior officers to appoint the third as the army chief.
Moreover, it was generally believed that as Gen Dalbir Singh Suhag, the outgoing chief of army staff was from the Gorkha Rifles, his successor could be from another regiment or another arm — after all, the next in line, Lt Gen Praveen Bakshi, currently general officer commanding-in-chief of the Eastern Command and the senior-most after Gen Suhag, is from the cavalry.
But the unthinkable happened. Not only has another Gorkha officer become the army chief, but the government has pointedly emphasised that it is comfortable only with an infantryman at the helm of affairs. For the rest of his tenure, therefore, Gen Rawat has two onerous professional challenges: keeping the Indian Army happy and together under his command, and vindicating the government’s faith in him by ensuring infiltration and terrorist attacks are foiled convincingly.
It was with both disquiet and confusion that senior army officers noted a senior officer of the Border Security Force saying complacently on television after a recent attack on an artillery unit mess in Nagrota (where terrorists came through a barbed wire perimeter into an area where families were staying and began firing, killing two officers and three jawans) that “they (fidayeen) only attack the army. They never attack us.”
While it is true that BSF posts along the international border are only the target of firing and almost never of real infiltration, the comment was interpreted by the army as introducing an element of rivalry between the two forces that have little in common. It took the army an extended operation to vanquish a squad of three fidayeen in Nagrota. A former general returning from a trip abroad reported that at the immigration desk, the official told him: “What on earth has happened to the Indian Army? Even the BSF is ridiculing you.”
While this may be the reaction of the uninformed, one of the tasks of Gen Rawat will be to counter this kind of loose talk. It won’t be easy — if Gen Suhag had to shrug off the controversial legacy of his predecessor, Gen VK Singh, Gen Rawat will have to address the twin challenges of infiltration and militancy in his quiet, understated style.
Gen Rawat’s professional credentials are unimpeachable: he commanded a company at Uri, a battalion of the 11th Gorkhas in the North East, the Rashtriya Rifles Sector at Sopore (the heart of militancy in North Kashmir), and commanded a Corps in the North East, where he secured not just Arunachal Pradesh on the Sino-Indian border, but also handled the insurgency in Nagaland, Manipur and lower Assam. He planned and helped execute the raid along the Myanmar border in early July 2015. He commanded the Southern Command at Pune before assuming the position of vice-chief of the army staff under Gen Suhag. And, of course, he is a Gorkha, which makes him unquestionably the bravest of the brave!
Aditi Phadnis
