To see our armed forces as a school of scandal is doing disservice to the nation and to the facts
Is ours an army of thieves? Or, more specifically, is it officered by people who are only interested in manipulating weapons systems trial to make big bucks on the side, selling the national interest to the highest bidder and spending most of their time in their respective offices badmouthing their superiors, back-stabbing their peers and crushing the toes of their juniors?
I can go on and on in the same vein. But I am sure this line of questioning has got you angry enough already. Because, chances are you’d say that we have a patriotic, loyal, brave, professional and decent army led by our most honourable fellow Indians. They have built an institution over many decades that all of India gratefully respects and loves. They have fought bravely, and even successfully except once (1962), the many wars our nation has had to fight in these decades.
Then what is all this noise about?
We have now spent more than a decade watching our armed forces feature in the most unflattering headlines. There is always the shadow of Bofors, but it really started with Tehelka’s so-called Operation West End and, over the years, we have come to see every single defence deal as suspect. As if all our soldiers have been doing through our history is buying junk from around the world, and enriching themselves. So what if for every officer with an apartment in Adarsh, there are hundreds who live in two/ three-bedroom apartments in housing cooperatives. Again, will you put this to the test of facts?
Surely, our defence forces have always been short of crucial equipment, even during wars, and even during a heady 1985-89 phase when Rajiv Gandhi (and I will come back to why we need to salute his foresight now) took our defence budget, for the first, and the last time, beyond 4 per cent of our GDP (today it is well below two). But have they fought their wars with junk? With the exception of the 1962 debacle, they have always fought well, and on balance done better than their adversary even in a stalemate like 1965. From the 1947-48 Kashmir campaign to Kargil in 1999, our armed forces have looked adequately equipped to handle the challenge.
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If we were armed with rubbish mostly sold to us through bribery and commissions, wouldn’t our battle record have been rather different? Check out more facts. There is no secret about the weapon systems our three forces have bought during these decades. How many of these have turned out to be duds in battle? There may have been commissions paid (to some) for Bofors. But in the 25th year of its acquisition, the gun is still the mainstay of Indian artillery. You want a touch of irony: in this silver jubilee year, our ordnance factories have produced the first Bofors gun on their own, though the technology has been with them all this while. It is just that nobody in the system had had the courage to mention it. So Bofors-phobic had we become meanwhile.
Surely there may have been some duds. But these have been rare, and coincidental. By and large our defence acquisitions have been wise, optimal and effective. It is nobody’s case that in some cases some money may not have been made by a few on the side. But to extrapolate it to fit today’ssab chor hai mood would point to a spirit of collective suicide, as if we are a nation that learnt its spirituality from some madcap in Waco, Texas.
If you see the most visible (imported) weapon systems of the three forces today: the T-72 tanks, Bofors guns, BMP armoured fighting vehicles of the army, MiG 21/27/29, Mirage 2000s, Su-30s, even old Jaguars of the IAF, German Type 209s, and Russian Kilo class submarines, Kashin destroyers of the navy, are all first-class, high-quality weapon systems. The three forces have used these well, sometimes better than what their manufacturers had imagined, and developed original doctrines around them. Remember, the use of Bofors guns in direct firing mode at Tiger Hill, the IAF marrying domestically rigged laser pods to drop guided bombs over bunkers in the Kargil campaign and the navy using larger vessels to tow the tiny (Soviet) OSA class missile boats to surprise the Pakistani fleet in Karachi in 1971, which believed (and rightly so) that these boats did not have the range to get that far.
You might ask, and with good reason, why are we saying all this now? Who, ever doubted the quality and commitment of our forces, their imagination as well as their jugaad?
You need to raise these questions because the time has come for well-meaning, patriotic Indians to stand up and speak the truth. That, despite all the controversies, and amid this constant talk of decline in values, the quality of the officer core and so on, if the armed forces have continued to give such a good account of themselves, not everything can be rotten. You want more facts, you can check the officer-to-other-rank casualty ratio in our recent campaigns, Kargil, even Jaffna. Our armies are led by very, very honourable people.
There are black sheep, and we must catch them. And when we do, we must hand out exemplary, and quick punishment to them. But let us now, collectively, get over that post-Bofors mindset of seeing every defence acquisition as a scandal. Nobody is benefiting more from this than arms dealers. Because the moment one is losing the deal, it orchestrates anonymous, vague complaints against the front-runner. We have rent-a-signature MPs to forward these factional rivalries in the forces and an utterly spineless civilian administration whose first response is to put the deal on hold and call in the CBI. As a consequence, our defence acquisitions have nearly come to a standstill. And even if they picked up last year, we are already showing signs of returning to normal.
India now needs a leadership, civilian and military, that stands by the process it has established, and takes responsibility for what is bought, at what price and in how timely a manner. Suspending all decision-making, or calling in the CBI even before a trial process is over, or getting paranoid about anonymous complaints, blacklisting large manufacturers merely on the basis of handwritten, unsigned suspicions is all a part of a cowardly syndrome that has now engulfed our higher defence establishment. It is difficult to see where this bad conscience comes from. But surely, nobody in this establishment has the spine, or the leadership, to show faith in their own system and to say that he will not allow anybody to be distracted. In fact, if there is a war today, most of the equipment that the three services will use was bought by the Rajiv Gandhi government despite the Bofors cloud, he kept purchases going.
So the fourth largest army in the world cannot be run by the CBI and motivated leaks from all sides. But that is where UPA’s spineless leadership of India’s higher security has brought us to. Their first instinct seems to be freeze at the first whiff of a controversy, and stop everything. A bit like preventing the spread of HIV by putting everybody in a chastity belt and throwing the keys in the Yamuna. That is why India’s higher defence crisis today is a crisis of leadership and confidence at the top. But given UPA 2’s record, where do you even begin telling that story?
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