The reprehensible removal of, Avinash Chander, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) just months after his tenure was extended by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government till May 2016 has once again focused attention on the imperious manner in which this government is trampling upon institutions.
It rekindles memories of the sordid events of December 30, 1998, when the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led government had unceremoniously sacked the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat. Incidentally, two days before his unceremonious departure Admiral Bhagwat had been elevated as chairperson of the Chiefs of Staff Committee.
Are both instances an uncanny coincidence or incessant political arrogance of the same political dispensation separated by time and space only?
The reasons for the sacking in both instances are superfluous and fuzzy. While the Navy Chief is a uniformed officer, the crown of the DRDO is also the scientific adviser to the defence minister, a position of enormous gravitas.
Does this cavalier, if not callous, attitude bode well for the higher defence management of the nation?
Unlike a number of countries around India, namely Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma, the Indian armed forces have never crossed the sacred Rubicon and have always remained committed to the constitutional tenets that underpin the Indian state.
However, civil-military relations in India are not exactly the Shangri-la of bliss. On the contrary, the armed forces have been unremittingly exasperated with the civilian bureaucracy.
They cogitate that it has a gratuitous pre-eminence in strategic affairs. Attempts to narrow the divergence and synchronise this dissonance have met with little or no success.
In the aftermath of the conflict in Kargil, the government appointed a review committee under the leadership of former defence secretary, K. Subrahmanyam, to examine the entire gamut of issues connected with the administration of India’s defence.
A group of ministers further deliberated upon the recommendations but nothing substantive came out of the whole exercise.
Subsequently, the Naresh Chandra Committee also went into the issue of defence reforms. They made apropos submissions that continue to linger in suspended animation.
The fundamental enigma is who is statutorily charged with the responsibility for defence of India. The rules of business mandate that it is the defence secretary who is charged with the remit.
The service chiefs are kept at an arm’s length from the realm of policy formulation, though they provide the necessary input and discernibly implement the decisions arrived at.
Coupled with this is the malady that service headquarters are not integrated into the defence ministry and function as an entity extrinsic to the rarefied echelons of the state.
The question that requires to be answered is what do we mean by civilian control of the defence establishment? Does it mean superintendence by the political executive or subordination to the bureaucracy?
Has this subordination impacted India’s defence preparedness and its ability to surmount the myriad challenges both in the region as well as beyond as India widens its strategic horizons.
Repeatedly it has been recommended that the government should appoint a Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) who should be the single point military adviser to the government. But successive governments have been chary about making this leap of faith.
What is, therefore, left with the armed forces and various other bodies that form the larger defence fraternity are the values of honour and respect, the imperative of being treated with due regard for the perilous duties they perform.
A case in point was the issue of former Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh’s date of birth. He articulated it as a matter of honour. Whether it was or not is debatable. He took the government to the Supreme Court and then had to withdraw the petition after the court refused to entertain it.
It was unprecedented that a serving chief takes the government of the day to court, thereby clearly indicating that he had lost confidence in the ability of the government to redress his grievances.
The government would have been well within its rights to ask the chief to go because a lack of trust and faith is a two-way affair.
Adding to the specter of distrust were bizarre rumours of alleged unauthorised troop movements and deployment of mobile communication interceptors in Delhi.
However, rather than asking him to either step down or resort to anything more knee-jerk, the United Progressive Alliance government acted with maturity and restraint.
It allowed him to complete his tenure and retire gracefully. What probably weighed with the government was the negative impact it would have on the armed forces as an institution had the government chosen to act in a churlish manner in order to validate the maxim of civilian dominance.
Run-ins between the civilian authorities and military personnel are not confined to India alone. Enough has been written about how both, Presidents Bush and Obama, were exasperated with their military commanders talking out of turn.
Both in Iraq and Afghanistan top military commanders were replaced or shuffled, but it was done with dignity and decorum.
Even during the Second World War, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill repeatedly transferred battlefield commanders, but it was done without rancour.
Despite being a one party state, the rulers of China are extremely meticulous as to how they treat the ranking apparatchiks of the People’s Liberation Army though the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party doubles up as the chairperson of the Central Military Commission.
Deng Xiaoping had famously advised his successor Jiang Zemin, “Out of five working days spend four with the top brass.”
While the DRDO may not be a uniformed service in the strict sense of the word, it draws into its fold personal from the uniformed services also.
While the track record of the organisation may be a mixed bag open to critique, nothing can detract from the commitment of the talented professionals who serve it passionately and altruistically. Many of them can easily get a quantum jump in their emoluments were they to move to the “civvie” street.
Rather than indulging in cosmetic histrionics, the government should try and understand the innate dynamics of the defence establishment. The battles that may have to be fought are outside, but that cannot be achieved by starting a war within.
The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari
