http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=112843#

General Rawat’s legacy in civil-military relations

General Bipin Rawat has etched a place in military history, not so much by way of martial feats as much for his contribution to civil-military relations of New India. He was first recipient of governmental favour in its resort to ‘deep selection’ as a policy for selection to higher rank. His showing in the successive appointments – army chief and chief of defence staff – places the policy under a pall, showing it up as a ploy for the regime’s attempt at institutional capture of the military, quite in the same vein as it has truncated other national institutions.

Deep selection

Rawat came into limelight as corps commander when two cross-border raids into Myanmar were undertaken simultaneously. These caught the eye of the national security adviser (NSA), who was curiously on hand to oversee a tactical level action, with the army chief in tow. It is not known how many hangers-on and camp-followers - and therefore in the reckoning of international humanitarian law, noncombatants – were among the 60 killed in the camps struck.

It cannot be said with any certainty which of the two influences on NSA Ajit Doval – Rawat’s operational skills or his being an ethnic kin - resulted in Rawat’s elevation for field army command in Pune, outpointing one of his seniors, PM Hariz heading the training command at Shimla. Hariz was doubly-handicapped, being a mechanised warfare expert, but - more pertinently - a Muslim, anathema in New India then emerging.

Later, called to Delhi as vice chief, he outflanked yet another senior, his earlier boss in the North East, General Praveen Bakshi. A journalist recounted how Rawat, as vice chief, was heard hailing the surgical strikes launched by the government after the terror attack on Uri garrison. Did Rawat anticipate a shift to ‘deep selection’ to substitute for the seniority principle in selection of the apex military leaders or was he tipped off by his new found mentor within the new regime?

Such questioning is pertinent when contrasted with General Bakshi, for his part, by underplaying another surgical strike into Myanmar, did precisely the opposite. As it turned out in the run up to change over of army chief, men in shadows whispered against the front runner, General Praveen Bakshi. The deep selection policy had a positive start in the precedence set by the two officers superseded soldiering on.

Whether Rawat played with a straight bat at this juncture comes into question. He did not live up to the precedence in which two officers offered the chair of the army chief stepped aside for their senior being superseded: Generals Nathu Singh and Rajendrasinhji in favour of the senior most Indian officer, General Cariappa.

Operational showing

It soon became evident Rawat was selected for implementing the regime’s soon-to-unfold policy in Kashmir. Operation All Out was just that: a take-no-prisoners approach between 2016 and 2019. Rawat as its principal agent brought about a cultural makeover in the military’s approach, best exemplified by infamous ‘human shield’ episode.

The operations set the stage for the voiding of Article 370 by preemptively de-fanging any potential armed backlash. It is lost to history what Rawat’s input on this was, since the action has resulted not only in present-day aggravation of the situation but also in a long term threat lingering in Kashmir.

To keep Pakistan on a tight leash, Rawat touted surgical strikes. The second surgical strike did not involve the army directly, but the riposte of the Pakistani air force almost got its northern army commander, then visiting the forward defended localities, leaving the army rather red-faced.

But the more significant military event on Rawat’s watch was the Ladakh intrusion. Whereas early in Rawat’s tenure, the army had mobilized and held its own at Doklam, the outcome turned out vacuous. The Chinese reckoning that a similar outcome was possible in Ladakh, launched a massive intrusion in early 2020.

Rawat, by then chief of defence staff (CDS), did not exhibit any dexterity in a timely, equivalent grab action elsewhere. The army always has such contingency plans up its sleeve and its operational formations have intrinsic capability. It had exercised this capability only the previous autumn. Covid outbreak is not a plausible excuse for settling for ‘mirror deployment’, on over the last two winters, only redesignated as ‘proactive localized deployment’. This year, the army even stepped back from the Kailash range, which it had taken over amidst some auto-backslapping last year.

Apparently, CDS Rawat was persuaded that Chinese comprehensive national power was improbably of the order that a regional power, India, could not indulge itself in a perfectly legitimate and militarily plausible, localized, border war. Arguably, Rawat can be faulted for taking the counsel of his fears in his advice as the principal military adviser to the defence minister.

For its part, the government got the advice it bargained for, having chosen a counter-insurgency expert as top military adviser. So enamoured was Rawat with ‘grey zone’ war theory - on which the army doctrine put out under his tutelage is based – that the military appears to have concluded conventional war is passé. Since this emphasizes the ‘half front’ of the ‘two and half front war’ formulation put out by Rawat, it inserts the army into an essentially civilian domain, leading up to the logic articulated by the NSA that civil society is the new threat to national security. 

Elusive Jointness

Rawat’s approach to war-fighting played out in his controversial public face-off with the Air Force. To universal surprise, he admitted to a view that the air force was but an extension of the artillery. This appears a hangover of 1962, when the air was kept out of the conflict. The air force, with a self-belief as a service with a strategic purpose, was quick to publicly contradict Rawat.

A similar run in was with the Navy. While the silent service wishes for sea control capabilities, based on carriers, Rawat instead plugged for a sea-denial capability built on submarines. The argument reached such proportions that Rawat skipped the last Navy Day ceremonies, instead scheduling a lecture at Ajay Singh Bisht’s pocket borough, Gorakhpur.

With turf wars as this, Rawat’s legacy, being associated with the inception of the joint theatre command concept, is dead at birth. Rawat over-interpreted the press note on the appointment of the CDS. The mandate given therein does not state require front-specific joint theatre commands, pressed for by Rawat.

Rawat was unable to see through the politician’s ploy of shooting from his shoulders by not providing him with political direction. Rather than calling out this bit of political abdication on the part of his political masters, he instead went for a bottom-up solution, ordering the services to come up with studies on theatre commands. Though Rawat ran out of time wrapping up jointness, his successor must convince political masters that their investing political capital is necessary.

Inroads of ideology

It is for historians to unravel if Rawat’s forays into the headlines from time to time – the latest being his defence of lynchings – were because he sat on a difficult chair in the worst of times or because he was a regime acolyte. In favour of Rawat, it can be argued that seeing institutions fall like nine-pins around him, perhaps his foremost worry was to preserve the military from a similar fate. A choice to sway with the political ill-wind in such a case could arguably be taken as a pragmatic one. Unfortunately, in Rawat’s case there is no evidence yet that he ever had it mind to defer to the right wing political line only for pragmatic reasons: to ward off worse to come if he were to embark on confrontation. Clearly, the lessons of Admiral Bhagwat’s sacking reverberate through the decades, as perhaps they were meant to.  

However, the foot-in-mouth syndrome that persisted all through his tenure prevents unambiguously ruling out that he was not purveyor of an ideological line, impardonable in a uniformed office holder. Till biographers tell us otherwise, Rawat will have to be held partially accountable for the departures from traditional civil-military relations in his time at the helm. 

 

 https://m.thewire.in/article/security/what-will-be-general-bipin-rawats-place-in-indias-military-history

What Will Be General Bipin Rawat’s Place in India's Military History?

Now that the dust from the helicopter accident has settled, it is worth examining General Rawat’s contribution at the apex of the military. He occupied space at the highest levels for some five years, more than anyone in independent India, having been army chief for some three years and chief of defence staff (CDS) for close to two years.

During this period, significant and unprecedented military developments took place in respect of Pakistan and China and, equally importantly, in regard to Kashmir and the North East. Consequential military reforms were also undertaken, including his elevation as the first CDS, first permanent chairperson of the chiefs of staff committee and secretary of the newly created department of military affairs (DMA) within the defence ministry. The greatest shift has been in terms of cultural transformation under the mostly-indirect influence of the foundational philosophy of New India, hindutva. These form the backdrop for determining the General’s place in history.

Pakistan figured large in the early part of the General’s tenure. Right off the blocks, he cleared up  India’s best kept puzzle: its conventional doctrine. India had not owned up over some fifteen years of its existence to the Cold Start doctrine. Not only did the General take ownership of the doctrine, but initiated steps for its operationalisation in the creation of integrated battle groups (IBG), the work horses of limited offensives into Pakistan in case compelled by Pakistani proxy war provocations.

Even so, it is a retrogressive step since it more or less accepts a lack of adeptness in maneuver warfare. There is no compelling need for preconfigured, objective-specific IBGs, when mechanized formations can flow into battle reconfiguring on the march. If they do not have this felicity at the outset, then it is incomprehensible how these battle groups can outlast the first bullet fired, which as military history teaches puts a spanner in the works of the best laid plans.

This betrays a military incapacity, brought about, in part by the counter insurgency fixation over past three decades. Incidentally this focus led to General Rawat, bolstered by supposed counter insurgency expertise, pipping at the post two of his seniors, from the mechanized forces, to the rank of general. Arguably this professional preoccupation led to India being blind-sided by China’s intrusions into Ladakh.

Though the army under General Rawat had taken a firm stand at Doklam, it proved a meager deterrent. The Chinese apparently rightly reading India’s reluctance to up the military ante walked into Ladakh, clubbing a score Indian soldiers to death as they did so. This unwillingness to chance escalation suggests a deficiency in the exercise of operational art in terms of manipulation of the escalation threat in order to make the other side blink. As CDS, Rawat was overly impressed by the gap in comprehensive military power between the two sides, resting on his oars with mirror deployment, jargoned as ‘proactive localized deployment’, rather than going for a quick counter-grab in riposte. 

It is in relation to Kashmir that the General’s military reputation stands to suffer most, since it’s the site of his expertise. Not only did the General oversee a human rights-insensitive counter insurgency campaign, Operation All Out, but did not alert the government to the adverse long term effects of its Kashmir policy twist, the voiding of Article 370. As the lead agency in the Valley, the army should have asked for voicing its input and done so by thumping the table against the initiative. That it did not do so bespeaks of either being persuaded by the action or not having the gumption to take a stand. Either way is unedifying.

The post-Uri terror attack surgical strikes were prior to the General’s tenure at the helm, but were based on his stewardship of similar high-publicity strikes into Myanmar as corps commander in the North East. These led to his catching the eye of National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval, an ethnic fellow. Similar strikes the following year were downplayed by the then eastern army commander, General Praveen Bakshi, resulting in part in his being sidelined from the army Chief’s chair, since it deprived the political masters of an opportunity to grandstand over a military feat.

Surgical strikes have thus had more of a domestic political fallout than an external strategic one. Pakistan, the intended target of deterrence, has gone one-up over India in its aerial riposte to Balakot. That Pakistan has been relatively restrained over the General’s tenure in Kashmir owes to its privileging the Afghanistan denouement over the past few years, rather than being impressed by India’s strategic shift advertised by surgical strikes. 

The recent botched military operation in Nagaland shows up vulnerability, accentuated in the ongoing long-duration crisis with China. Whether and to what levels General Rawat input the government’s policy is not known. For instance, the Nagaland imbroglio continues since the Framework Agreement cannot be operationalised as the Nagas insist on a separate flag and Constitution. India, having only recently deprived Kashmiris of the same federal privileges has in effect shot itself in the foot twice over. Strategic level input from the army, the lead counter insurgency force in both locations, should have been to influence policy away from such counter-productive initiatives. It is lost to history if General Rawat exercised his known social capital with the regime to put some strategic sense into its moves.

It would be tragic if later biographers were to alight on evidence that his input on such decisions was instead to acquiesce. It brings into question his elevation, raising the question was it because he would likely play along - either being docile or a believer himself - that led to his selection as first CDS? Recall the announcement of the position was delayed till after his contender, the then air chief, retired. Even the CDS position was not without a spoke-in-the-wheel in that with the creation of the DMA – a bureaucratic silo without precedent in any democracy - the first CDS was reduced to being just another secretary, from a protocol equivalence to cabinet secretary.

Here, General Rawat busied himself with structural transformation without the benefit of a political directive, resulting in separate public and embarrassing jousts with the air and naval chiefs. It is also unclear if the trajectory of jointness to culminate in front-specific integrated theatre commands has political imprimatur, given that the mandate does not explicitly figure in the remit of the CDS in the press release on the appointment. The process therefore appears to be somewhat of a wild goose chase that shall prove a bugbear if his successor does not take the opportunity of a change over to course correct.  

Finally, and most importantly, was General Rawat’s perhaps historic role of ushering the Indian army into the New India of the Second Republic. To be fair to the General, he was at the helm at the most difficult of times for the military. When all institutions succumbed to the hindutva juggernaut and bent to the will of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it would have been quite a feat had the military leadership cauterised the military from being influenced by political forces.

The military’s political masters decided to go in for ‘deep selection’ as the new policy for selection of higher appointments, Rawat being a prominent beneficiary. It remains to be known whether he swayed with the wind pragmatically and, as lead gatekeeper, assented to open up the military only partially and selectively. This might have been a plausible strategy, lest in taking a stand the military were to keel over altogether. However, from his utterances from time to time, it cannot unambiguously be said that Rawat was not a bhakt himself. That might with time turn out his unfortunate legacy.