Daily Times

The sensational disclosure of an impending army coup sent alarm signals ringing throughout the Indian capital earlier in April. That was despite the fact that the coup, intended or imagined, traced back to January last, had been something quite dead and gone, yet the Indian parliament and the media magnified it beyond its existential reality.

Deeply seated in the psyche of the subcontinent remains the popular image of the man on horseback, ‘the booted and spurred Jehovah’ in the language of Albert Camus (The Rebel) to come and rescue them from their trials and tribulations — past and present.

The coup canard acquired the cutting edge of what was generally reported to be ‘strained relations’ between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the highly controversial Army chief, General V K Singh, set to retire by the end of May this year on completion of his tenure.

Without reflecting on General Singh’s integrity as a soldier, he was noted as a bitter critic of the government in matters concerning national defence. His shocking revelations about critical deficiencies in combat hardware incriminated the ministerial defence establishment as much as the prime minister himself.

As for the coup scare, it was caused by a corps/army level field exercise in December-January last near the national capital. The phantom coup featuring some infantry units of the 33rd Armoured Division, deployed some 150 kilometres from Delhi, together with a unit of the Agra-based 50 Para Brigade (airborne or air mobile), hit the outskirts of Delhi to create the scare. It happened to be a dense, foggy morning, typical of the Delhi winter. This was said to be part of a controlled exercise to test the performance of the men and machines in dark inclement weather conditions. However, there appeared to be a huge communication gap between the civil and military authorities.

The sudden influx of armour, mechanised vehicles and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) along unmarked routes in the immediate vicinity of the capital was no ordinary matter. Heavy fog had reduced visibility to endanger safety all over the area.

On that very day marking the end of the exercise, General Singh moved the Supreme Court for a correction of his date of birth to give him another year in his term as the army chief.

On that day, Singh’s entire attention should normally have been focused on the coordination of the final phase of the exercise. It was all the more important for the maneouvres being staged so close to the national capital. That was not to be, however.

The whistle blower happened to be The Indian Express, claiming that the “unnotified nocturnal deployments” had “sparked” concern about a “possible coup” at a time when civil-military relations had been “strained”.

The army chief and the prime minister stood eyeing each other in an adversarial mode. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rushed to the defence of the army ‘outside’ parliament. He warned that no one was to do anything to “lower the dignity of the army chief”.

Something rare and no less ironic for the chief executive to defend the ‘dignity’ of the army chief, downgraded in the official warrant of precedence to a grade-22 status.

Dismissing the Express report as “absolutely baseless”, Defence Minister A K Antony said, “They (the army) will not do anything against democracy.” “They are true patriots.” The defence minister’s statement sounded more like a prayer and a wish than something quite unthinkable and beyond any doubt in respect of a reputedly apolitical army.

The incident was important because it underlined the ‘distrust’ between the army and the government; civil-military relations are reported to be at an ‘all time low’. The Bharatya Janata Party stressed correcting the imbalance between the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) and the army chief.

Undue civilian interference with the autonomy of military command might adversely impact the institutional cohesiveness of the army more than augmenting civilian control.

A coup-free army like India’s is likely to be tempted to taste the forbidden fruit of a coup d’état, unaware of its bitter aftertaste like our own. Many times bitten by the smelly bug of absolute power, the Pakistan army remains shy of civilian involvement except when called in aid of civil power.

However, the alarming coup scare caused by a training exercise with troops was no ordinary episode. It looked like a sudden upsurge of deep-seated fears to bring the civilian establishment at the highest level to its feet in the backdrop of the standoff between the chief executive and the army chief. Nevertheless, should General Singh not have been made to answer for the gross lapse of security together with his own failure, deliberate or otherwise, to keep the government abreast with gaping holes in war materials? (For a detailed account see “General Singh: sad endgame or sorry confessional?” Daily Times, April 23, 2012.)

Already the world’s biggest importer of arms, India is projected to spend $ 15 billion in the next 15 years or so. This alone would call for maximum security and safety of the expensive hardware, trials in actual field conditions, and vital knowhow about its shelf life before obsolescence reduces it to junk.

The Singh affair must lead to a revaluation and reorientation of civil-military relations to determine whether the government should minimise the professional role of the military by subjecting it to dire civil control and media trials, or whether its war potential should be maximised by arming it to the teeth and letting it be on its own under the command of its chief as far as possible. In simple language, whether to let the military alone, if not exactly above, the supreme civilian policies control and command. Such had been the case in Pakistan. Incompetent and weak civilian governments allowed the army to have a say in all matters of state, in particular foreign affairs, including getting in or out of such defence pacts as SEATO, CENTO, and risking such misadventures as Musharraf’s Kargil fiasco.

General V K Singh’s tenure has manifestly been a bizarre mix of military clout and scant regard for competent civilian authority. Without jumping to any definite conclusion about qualitative change in the traditional pattern of civilian control of the military, General Singh’s shadow would continue to chase and affect civil-military relations for a long time to come.

The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk