Since I cannot claim to know much about defence matters, I have little choice but to go by what some friends like General Jacob (retired) and K Subrahmanyam tell me. And I have it on their authority that General Rodrigues is a competent professional we can rely upon to look after the country’s security in this difficult period.
Three other points can be made about the army chief of staff on the basis of his “controversial” interview to this newspaper (March 12 and 14). First, he is not dumb; he likes to express himself on matters concerning the nation’s defence. Second, he is reasonably well equipped to do so; witness the questions he raised about the possible roles of China, Russia and America in the five-power discussions proposed by Pakistan (at Washington’s instance) to India on the issue of a nuclear weapons-free south Asia; his use of the barrack room term “bandicoots” only shows that he is not an inhibited fellow. Finally, he is inclined to stretch himself to accommodate the government’s point of view on the army’s role in internal security matters. It is difficult to believe that General Sundarji, for instance, would have said that internal security is as essential a role for the army as meeting an external threat.
Some of the opposition MPs capable of little more than the proverbial Pavlovian response picked on “bandicoot” as if it was a four-letter word (and another formulation to demand the general’s head). He had welcomed the public discussion on the army’s role in internal security and said, “…suddenly we find that good governance is our business as well.”
The only exceptionable word in this formulation is “suddenly”. “Good governance” has always been the army’s concern as much as it has been any other Indian’s for the good and obvious reason that it consists of Indians who cannot be indifferent to the way their country’s affairs are managed. It is another matter that the army has been as helpless as many others. The army’s extensive involvement in internal security over long periods in recent years only underscores the point that there is a legitimate cause for concern on this score. The cause for concern itself is not new. It has only been heightened in recent years.
As in much of what passes for public discourse in our country, the issues raised by General Rodrigues have been sloganised and trivialised. Instead of discussing the substance of the points he has raised, attention has been focussed on his right to express himself publicly. This question may be relevant, but it is not central. The central question is: why has the “siege within”, in MJ Akbar’s telling phrase, become so acute as to call for the army’s intervention on so extensive a scale as to put at risk its training and therefore its capacity to perform its principal task of looking after the country’s external security?
We should consider ourselves lucky that in the name of civilian control over the armed forces, no MP suggested that politicians should be appointed to head or at least co-head the three services. After all, this is precisely what the models of some of them – Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong – did to achieve the same objective: civilian control.
Civilian control over the armed forces is doubtless implicit in any theory and practice of democracy. But in our case it needs to be recognised that while the danger of an army coup has been non-existent, undue interference by politicians in the armed forces has been a fact of history. Krishna Menon had, for instance, almost disabled the Indian army higher command, with or without Pandit Nehru’s consent, as became evident at the time of the Chinese attack in 1962. The army could perhaps have gone the way of the police force if the Chinese, of course unwittingly, had not come to our rescue. They obliged even Congress MPs to insist on Menon’s removal from the defence ministry.
It does not work in real life when defence ministers know precious little about defence matters. It has proved pretty dangerous in one case. Perhaps even more pertinently, it has given rise to a situation in which politicians can feel free to pursue wrong policies because they know that in the final analysis they can call in the army to control the mess they create. Operation Bluestar is a classic example because this is one instance in which the strain proved too much to bear, at least for many young Sikh recruits.
It is not my contention that Mrs Indira Gandhi sat idly by as the Golden Temple was fortified because she felt that she could send the army in if the matter came to a crunch. And, of course, I do not buy the theory that she let matters drift because she was trying to arouse anti-Sikh sentiments among Hindu voters with an eye on the approaching general election. She was, in my view, too good a nationalist to engage in such petty calculations. But it is my contention that she would have felt obliged to handle the problem very differently if she had been warned by an earlier precedent that it would not be possible to use the army.
The recent public disclosures regarding the kind of say General Powell has enjoyed in the deployment, use or non-use of US forces in the Gulf should interest us since America is a democracy. President Bush made the decision to make war on Iraq in August 1990. But General Powell determined the level of forces that would first be deployed. When President Bush was thinking of a second military attack a couple of months back, he had to give up the idea because the general insisted on a deployment level he did not regard feasible. That is how democracies function.
The question of the moral and intellectual fibre of our politicians apart, the Indian political class, if such a thing can be said to exist, is the product, during and after the Raj, of agitational activities which have been divorced from the experience of managing things. Defence is only one casualty of the lack of experience of this class. There are others, the economy being the most important of them, as is now being widely recognised. Politics, an euphemism for rampant populism, has been in command of the economy just as ineptitude and apathy, with an occasional touch of malignancy, have been in command of defence.
The management of a modern state is not like holding an election rally or “organising” a loan mela or a kirtan path. It is an extremely complicated business. Electoral politics, even if free of criminal association and money and muscle power, is not designed to throw up men (and women) who are equipped for the task. The task itself can be ignored at our peril. So, to use Chinese terminology, the red and the expert have to be put together under one roof, persuaded and enabled to cooperate for the common good.
It is ridiculous to believe that we can refashion our institutions to suit our requirement. We cannot, if only because we cannot possibly enact another constitution. Anyone who believes that a new constitution is within our reach in today’s conditions of fragmented and raucous politics can believe anything. But it is possible for a sensible prime minister to establish a measure of rapport with experts in various fields.
Politics, as the saying goes, is the art of the possible. But what is possible has to be determined and it can be extended. It might have been useful to permit a debate in parliament on General Rodrigues’ interview, though it must be conceded that the treasury benches too represent and reflect the same sloganised approach as much of the opposition.
The Pioneer on Sunday, 29 March 1992