A DISPUTE THAT SHAMES INDIA

The row over the Army Chief’s age and his decision to go to the Supreme Court to settle the matter shames both the army and the government. The issue has got so important that it has made the front pages of newspapers across the world as an example of how surreal this kind of dispute can become in India.
Neither the Indian Army nor the Government of India have found the time or the resources to come up even with modern uniforms for our troops but it finds the time to waste on a disagreement that could and should have been avoided. When our soldiers were last in a situation of combat during the Kargil war we discovered that not only did they not have proper equipment and clothes to fight at high altitudes there were not even a sufficient number of decent coffins available to bring back the dead. These are the things that should concern both the government and the Army Chief. Instead, since almost the beginning of his tenure all we have talked about is his age.

General V.K. Singh has clarified that his reasons for going to court against the government have more to do with his honour than his tenure. If it is established that he was indeed born on May 10, 1950, and not on that a year later, then he is due to retire in a few weeks. It’s not he carries on his job for another year. So it is hard to believe that tenure does not have anything to do with his determination to fight the government in court but it must be said that had the Defence Minister handled things with discretion and competence it would not have come to such a pass.

This attitude has harmed not just the Army Chief personally but the armed forces in general. The Army Chief should think about his institute and must try to bring harmony and understanding in the army but VK Singh is fighting for his personal interest. He is thinking about his power and wants to extend it as long as he can. He has no interest in the issues of soldiers who are fighting on the borders. He doesn’t want to solve their issues he dame cares about them. As an army chief he has overlooked his organization which has feed him more than 20years. How else do we explain that the Indian Army must be the army in the world that wears uniforms designed for soldiers fighting wars in the middle of the last century? And, with weapons that seem antique compared with the weapons terrorists use when they attack India. The nature of wars has changed completely. We were made brutally aware of this after 26/11, but instead of finding ways to prepare the Indian Army for this new kind of warfare we have spent most of the past year discussing whether the Army Chief is lying about his age.