The new military leadership must emphasise professional distance
A recent turnover in the army’s leadership witnessed the emplacing of the next batch out till end decade. General Dhiraj Seth’s long-expected move to Delhi as preparation to take over as the next army chief is clear from the precedence of the last five chiefs having first been brought to Delhi as vice chiefs. The move appears to have been thought up a year back, with General Chauhan asked to stay on, so that Seth gets to Delhi without stepping over the lone army commander holdover from a senior batch.
A case that did not see such smooth succession was that of General Mohanty. He could well have taken over as chief had General Naravane been kicked upstairs as chief of defence staff (CDS); a position vacant since General Rawat’s untimely death. Even if General Rawat had retired at age 62 after a tenure of two years – though curiously his appointment was without a sunset clause - this could still have been the case.
However, the regime’s retrospectively reckonable antipathy for Naravane came in the way. By then the incidents in Ladakh - narrated in Naravane’s controversial unpublished book - had taken place. Also, the regime had to wait out Naravane before it could launch its agnipath scheme, which Naravane’s recount makes clear: “As usual in the end, the PM had some stories of his own. If in the last interaction, it was about the kite industry in Gujarat, this time it was about railway lines, more specifically, new railway lines (p. 311).” Mohanty’s career can thus be taken as unfortunate collateral damage. In the event, a gobsmacked engineer four-star acceded, assisted by a three-star engineer.
With the CDS appointment too falling vacant a month earlier than that of the army chief, the race is on. The criteria for the CDS appointment were rejigged under the assumption that being senior in service to the serving chiefs would give a three-star CDS appointee additional heft from seniority. Yet, strangely in a command-obsessed military, it remains hobbled since the criteria does not call for a ‘command stream’ appointee, implying that the post is tenable by any three-star whose last command was at one-star!
For now, recently retired three-star general officers hope to emulate General Anil Chauhan. A frontrunner appears to be one who got off to a head start, and has only reinforced his credentials since. Distressing to see are those with four-stars also positioning to follow in General Rawat’s footsteps.
General Dwivedi has taken to pilgrimages, thoughtfully adding that it is on behalf of the army, knowing his earlier forays seeking god’s favour did not go unremarked. The general has to work harder, since if the regime wanted to upgrade him, it could have well done so last year, without extending General Chauhan’s services.
His classmate from his sainik school days, Admiral Tripathi, has taken to fawning signaling: “we were also very proud to showcase the breadth and depth of our operational capabilities to the Prime Minister during a historic 17-hour overnight embarkation with the Indian Navy on the western seaboard.”
The admiral claimed that had Operation (Op) Sindoor lasted ‘minutes’ longer, then the navy would have left its mark on Karachi. From the Iran War II in the backdrop, it is abundantly clear that this is not a proposition to be glib about. In rebound, the Pakistani naval chief appears to have anticipated a lesson of the ongoing war. In the event, Admiral Tripathi’s classmate’s invoking of the gods would have proved mite useful.
An unstated agenda
What is clear is that despite the cautioning, the politicisation of the military has progressed considerably. The regime might like to normalise politicisation by making it unremarkable, as the way things ought to be and are increasingly just so.
Normalisation entails the embedding the ‘new normal’ in the consciousness of a politically-oriented armed forces. This extends the current-day inference of the newly-minted Pakistan-specific strategic doctrine of ‘new normal’ into the military’s sociological sphere. Sociologically, the ‘new normal’ is in the shift of the military to being properly the military of a majoritarian state.
It cannot be that a military is out of step with a regime as powerful as this one. If political culture changes, strategic culture follows, as must organisational culture. There is no gainsaying the fact that Hindutva has founded a new political reality, even if its methods leave much to be desired. Its worldview has aims justifying ways, means and methods; which upturns the Gandhian reading in the reverse.
The Indian military’s distancing from politics is not only a British legacy, but followed the Huntingtonian fashion of the day as the Republic got going. Its professional distance had three mutually reinforcing pillars: physical separation in cantonments; intellectual distance from the social rough and tumble; and an insulating babudom layer from a ‘vile’ political class. This led to a ‘value gap,’ especially in the coalition period when its operational commitments multiplied. It thereafter appears to have warmed to a strong hand on the rudder. From the political side, the aim is to domesticate the military as its done with all other institutions. The winds from without are also along such lines.
Unsurprisingly, the just-released defence forces vision fights shy of explicit mention of this aspect. It instead subsumes the change disingenuously in one of its ‘strategic priorities and goals’: ‘strategic culture and climate’ that requires defence forces ‘take pride in our legacy, (and) develop a nationalist outlook.’
While there can be no umbrage with India’s civilizational legacy inspiring, legacy is selectively delineated. It’s been ‘go to Pakistan’ for the medieval portion, and since ‘colonial practices need to be shed,’ the British Indian legacy is subject to decolonisation. That the periodisation of history is itself borrowed from Orientalists does not faze, since the orientalists received input from upper-caste native informers.
Interestingly, the vision carries no mention of ‘fusionism,’ the logical next steps to consolidation. While yet again fusion currently restricts itself to a marriage between innovators and industry with the military, its meaning in the sociological sense has already been broached, in its interpretation as a Saraswati-Laxmi-Durga triumvirate. (A factoid: Fusion was first referenced by late Maroof Raza.)
Preserving professionalism
A lesson from the ongoing culling of generals allegedly sceptical of ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda is that it weakens professionalism and may exact an operational cost. The replacement of the sacked general had sent in greetings to Trump on his second presidency win, hardly an encouraging credential.
Taking cue, in its institutional interest, the military must guard against dilution of its professionalism, at a time when professionalism is at a premium, with Op Sindoor 2.0 liable to bring Kolkata into the crosshairs, if not quite Delhi and Mumbai.
Help from the regime might not be forthcoming. It has put up the CDS post as a carrot. The incumbents have so far been professional, sporting between them 11 military awards. Even so, both had to broadcast their predilections to gain the regime’s attention. Both need not have done this, given they had a weighty insider on their side, ethnic kin Ajit Doval. The jump-through-the-hoops is now more expansive.
Three things need doing to steady the military’s professional boat.
One is that the criteria requires a rejig, restricting it to serving service officers with three-star level command experience; and, two, the military must dilute its seniority mindedness. Colin Powell superseded over a score contemporaries when elevated at 52 years of age as the youngest incumbent to an equivalent job; though admittedly his is not the best example given that he had successively truncated command tenures.
The third is for military members to emulate the better examples amongst their peers. Take the case of the self-same General Mohanty. Though a counter-factual, it can be hazarded that had he signalled he was amenable to the then in-the-works agnipath scheme, he would likely have made four-star. Howsoever distasteful to the regime, Naravane could have been put out of the way as CDS, chasing - as General Chauhan has gallantly done – the will-o’-the-wisp: theaterisation.
It’s better to honourably retire with dignity, as forerunners whose names live on - SD Verma, SPP Thorat, Praveen Bakshi. With brass-hats choosing to fade away as in yonder years, lost professional distance can yet be reinstated.
