Ishan Joshi 

The Commentariat has its knickers in a twist over the Army Chief speaking his mind on the issues of the day. Let's examine why

Scare-mongering has long been the refuge of the pseudo-secular post-Nehruvian Indian elite and the middle-class which has survived on its crumbs, especially when it comes to matters and men military. An ersatz bunch of activists in academia, media and on the seminar circuit which is near-schizophrenic in its hatred for those who do not conform to their guiding principle of never recognising in theory or practice the nation-state as the primary unit of interaction between countries and as a point of reference for co-citizens within, has been talking up the alleged danger, quite obviously to its own worldview, of the Army Chief speaking his mind at quasi-public fora including seminars and workshops.

Well, being intellectually enamoured by hippy, happy, possibly trippy notions of the brotherhood of man and all that jazz whether emanating from a banal adherence to the ruthless principles of Leninist world communism, or a rather more airy fairy, effete-liberal Lennon-inspired search for mutual bliss-points, or indeed the single-minded superiority seeking determination of the Ummah-minded to shape the world in their image, is neither illegal nor unconstitutional in India. But it is very silly.

Of course, all above mentioned and anyone else besides who feels inclined to weigh in and have a go at infantilising the Army Chief when his comments, whether based on empirical or anecdotal evidence depending on the platform of articulation, don't suit certain a priori assumptions, are free to do so. Just as a muscular-liberal, Hindu reformist, feminist from an Indic civilisational tradition receptive to the notion of an Indian exceptionalism is empowered to call out this derivate narrative for what it is.

There are two central aspects to the outpouring of self-righteous angst against General Bipin Rawat’s recent comments on the use of strategic infiltration as an instrument of state policy by our neighbours and the all-encompassing consequences of demographic changes thus wrought including their manifestation in regional political organisations, which themselves came after a robust articulation of his views on zero-tolerance for those attempting to hinder anti-terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir and, ironically, the demand for Field Marshal KC Cariappa to be awarded the Bharat Ratna.

The first concerns those who have a problem with what he said. Senior commentator Sandhya Jain has in an article published in these columns on Tuesday provided a detailed riposte, magnificently magisterial in tenor, to the fallacious and factually incorrect fulminations of those accusing Gen. Rawat of making “political statements”. To quote her summation, “To lambast the General for making a political statement is absurd; a military strategist understands the political dimensions of every issue.” No more need be said.

The second issue, and the one which concerns us here, is the implicit, sotto voce and ongoing campaign by those who have a problem with the fact that a thinking General, and not the first in the Indian Army by any yardstick, is speaking at all. And the overarching culture of complicity or the meta-thesis, to use a fancy word, that has provided fertile ground for such a view to take root.

The Left-Liberal establishment at its apogee, do remember, had perfected the art of infantilising the armed forces. The old line about military intelligence being a contradiction in terms and of Colonel Blimp characters who populate middle and command-level ranks have very much been part of the sub-culture of civilian-military relations. And they evoked good-humoured guffaws from the subjects of the jest too, not least because having the ability to laugh at oneself when caricatured is certainly an officer-like quality. But all of this came later. The early post-Independence effort by the Indian state to assert the supremacy of the elected civilian leadership over the military and institutionalising that relationship was necessary both as a democratic and a republican imperative.

For all his subsequent mistakes in terms of state policy, Jawaharlal Nehru, nothing if not a child of his age and privilege, was quite structured and not averse to playing hardball in his approach towards ensuring this came to fruition, especially given the experience of other post-colonial nation-states that emerged from the detritus of the British Empire. That the Army top brass came from a similar class background helped, and the British colonial tradition in which it was trained provided a template for them to follow. Where the Nehruvian state got over-enthusiastic, however, was in deviating from that template by not including, in an institutional arrangement, a mechanism for strategic and national security inputs from the armed forces. Imagine the Admiralty not having a say in Whitehall.

A pseudo socialist notion of the ‘people’s/liberation army’ kind which chafed at the, as they saw it, imported colonial construct which was the Indian Army had its adherents too including in the upper reaches of Government. All of which combined to keep military minds out of key strategic and security policy-making and effectively signalled to the armed forces that they should, as it were, go play polo and ensure cantonments ran like clockwork when at peace and be ready to die for the country when at war. As part recompense, they were lauded as brave and honourable men, certified as being secular and apolitical. This, then, is the tradition intellectually internalised by those offended by the fact that India has an Army Chief with something to say and is going ahead and saying it.

Post-Nehru, for whom it can at least be said his intentions were good regardless of the destination they led India to, it got much worse. Fine minds in the bureaucracy aided by an intelligentsia that believed rather than thought and abetted by a political leadership swayed by the rhetoric of the times worked to deepen the intellectual isolation of the armed forces despite honourable but unfortunately episodic exceptions such as Indira Gandhi’s call on the Bangladesh War. (Though there is no doubt about the operational freedom given to the military, how far strategic inputs were encouraged and acted upon given her political leanings and the worldview of her advisers is still a matter of some debate.)

Today, in a situation where there is talk behind closed doors of a quality deficit in the armed forces, we need not only to welcome a thinking Chief’s interventions — and one is free to disagree with them though in the present case one agrees entirely — on the issues of the day but to institutionalise the system of the armed forces providing serious strategic inputs to the political leadership of the day at the policy-formulation stage itself rather than as a post-mortem. US civil-military institutional mechanisms provide a workable example of how this can be done without diluting the final say of a democratically elected civilian political leadership over the military.

As for the need for a culture of strategic debate which includes incorporating the lived experiences of women and men in uniform in various theatres of operation which the top brass would naturally distil before presenting, perhaps the albeit Mickey Mouse idea of a tank at JNU is not so absurd, after all. Provided it helps get all sides to engage with issues as opposed to trying to fit each other into neat compartments and then proceeding to demonise the other. National security is messy. Let’s deal with it like adults.

(Ishan Joshi is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer)

Courtesy: Pioneer: Thursday, 08 March 2018