So India has now decided to tail Pakistan. Following Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif’s decision to go down the seniority list and appoint the
officer fourth in the seniority list as chief of army staff, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, too, has gone down the list to select the
officer third in the Indian list of seniority as the army chief,
Lieutenant General Bipin Rawat..
Sharif also simultaneously appointed the senior-most in the Pakistani
list, Lt Gen Zubair Mehmood Hayat to the rank of Chairman Joint Chiefs
of Staff Committee. In keeping with the trend, we are hearing that Lt
Gen Praveen Bakshi might be elevated to the position of chief of a
tri-service defence staff. As Mohan Guruswamy has pointed out in a
Facebook post, this would entail Bakshi superseding Rawat, who has just
superseded him.
Supersession at the apex level of the army has not been unusual in
Pakistan. But the Indian decision to appoint Rawat, the current
vice-chief, as army chief in succession to General Dalbir Singh Suhag
has been met with controversy. The principle of seniority is a hallowed
one in the Indian army, and each supersession is remembered as
victimisation of a deserving officer like P.S. Bhagat or S.K. Sinha.
It is a bit difficult to accept the government’s claim that Rawat was
chosen solely on the basis of his merit. When you reach the rank of an
army commander, you have already gathered a life-time’s experience in
soldiering. The army chief is not an operational commander who needs to
be experienced in counter-insurgency. He is a supervisor – the
battlefield commander is the regional army commander. Look at the 1965
war, where Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh commanded the western front, or the
1971 war where Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora commanded the eastern front.
If we could push through reforms in our defence system, we would
actually have theatre commands and the army chief, as is the case
in China, the United States or other countries, would be merely
responsible for provisioning and training the force.
Yet, for the present we cannot deny the government its reasoning
process. Prime Minister Modi and his cabinet committee on security felt
that Rawat had all the requirements they wanted. They may be wrong, but
that doesn’t take away their prerogative to take a decision along lines
they consider the most optimal.
In doing what the government did, it has followed a laid down
procedure – five army commanders and the serving vice-chief constituted
a panel of names which were put up to the CCS for selection. There is
no requirement that the senior-most officer be selected, hence the need
for a panel. However, over the years, in a bid to avoid controversy over
appointments, the governments of the day have gone with seniority.
Actually, for no government appointment is strict seniority a good idea –
not just for the army chief, but in other departments as well. Ideally,
we should do away with the seniority system, provided it is done
through a well-thought through design and understanding of the
longer-term implications.
The army promotion ladder is steep and is already plagued with
another problem—the “zero fault” syndrome, where any error can lead to
losing your place in the queue. As is well known, only people who
actually do things are likely to make errors. So, the zero-fault
approach leads to an over-cautious officer cadre, which is not good when
you want a war-winning military.
Another factor that deserves consideration is the need to give the
incumbent of a top office in the military a term of at least four to
five years. The current two-year tenure is simply inadequate, with the
incumbent taking six months to sit firmly in the saddle and the last six
months in planning his retirement. But if longer terms are to become
the norm, so will larger scale supersession.
It is true that all this sounds nice in theory, but we live in a
deeply divided society where caste, religion and even sub-caste
affiliations colour a person’s view. This is evident in the army itself,
where chiefs are accused of promoting personnel from their own
respective arm and regiment. V.K. Singh was accused of promoting Rajput
regiment officers and now Dalbir Singh Suhag is charged with promoting
officers from the Gurkha regiments. In such an environment, biases are
not just imagined, but real. Besides such biases are the human ones
where sycophancy and a desire to please the bosses can be passed off as
capability. An unflinching look at our politics and society would
suggest that, perhaps, it is a good idea to go by seniority alone till
we become more complete “Indians” and our approach to government and
governance is more professional.
That said, there is a problem in appointing Bakshi as CDS after Rawat
has been named army chief. Whether it is the Arun Singh committee in
1990, the Group of Ministers recommendations in 2001 or the Naresh
Chandra committee in 2012, they have all seen the CDS/permanent chairman
chiefs of staff committee as the primus inter pares – or first
among equals. He is meant to be the principal and single-point military
adviser to the government. In view of that, the Naresh Chandra
committee suggested that he be selected from among the serving army,
navy or air force chiefs. Hopefully the government will not just make a
token appointment. The country desperately needs a CDS figure – not a
decorative figurehead – whose office must be fully empowered; just what
powers the CDS must enjoy have been listed out by various official
committees in great detail. Announcing a CDS without those powers, as
some in government have mooted, is to rob a serious recommendation of
its substance.
thewire.in December 20, 2016
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