Give the boys in uniform financial power
Governing India’s defence is never an easy task. A quick look at the governance of more than a million men and women in uniform indicates that there are any number of areas which can be improved upon. Before analysing these issues, three factors which constitute the core of Indian defence must be noted. First, unlike in a large number of developing countries, Indian defence has been apolitical since August 15,1947.Even though people of my generation heard of some shifts in character in the late 1950s and again in the mid-1970s, it was never substantiated. It was largely an effort to malign the Indian defence forces by vested interests outside the country. In addition, the defence forces have never aspired for political power.
Similarly, our armed forces never relied on self-sufficiency and indigenization of equipment. The joke in the corridors of power was that whenever an Indian soldier sees new equipment he immediately wants it for his service. It was left to political heavyweights like Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh, to stop this tamasha in the mid-1990s. I am told even Indira Gandhi was irritated by this attitude of the Services. It was from her time that Indocentric assessments of threat perception and weapon acquisition began and were refined over the years. In retrospect, one can say the Indocentric view gained acceptability from the political leadership as well as the Armed Forces around the late 1960s.
Lastly, India’s military operations in the Maldives in 1988 and in Sri Lanka in 1989-90 had shown a lack of coordination between the various intelligence organizations of the government and the defence forces. This became more evident during the Kargil war in 1999. Against this backdrop, if we look at the governance of the million plus men and women in uniform it becomes clear that intelligence, which has to play a major role in the work of these people, is not doing so. In the process, the decisionmaking apparatus is getting weakened. For some inexplicable reasons the civilian administrative apparatus has never paid much attention to this aspect of the three Services.
One of the most controversial issues in the governance of the defence forces is the civil-military relationship. One must recall what happened in the 1970s.At the time, the three Service Chiefs felt that they were ranked lower than the Defence Secretary. One of them is said to have remarked that the “baldy Defence Secretary is dictating terms to us while each one of us leads lakhs of men”. They appealed to the Prime Minister that they be ranked above all the civil servants, including the Cabinet Secretary! Mrs Gandhi decided that they would be
ranked above Defence Secretary but below Cabinet Secretary. This is because the Cabinet Secretary is the head of the entire bureaucratic machinery. One hears, almost on a daily basis, a Brigadier or a Major General complaining that he never gets a fair audience from, say, a Joint Secretary in the Ministry.
Who should be blamed for, say, lack of snow boots for the soldiers in the mountains of Kashmir?
A young officer who had interacted with a visiting Pakistani military delegation agitatedly told me that officers in Pakistan had four-bedroom houses whereas he could not expect even a single-bedroom house. I had to tell him that he should compare himself with officers of the People’s Liberation Army of China and see how well off he was. In the process, a whole set of issues came up like the career profile of a soldier and living conditions for him and his family.
Many of these misconceptions in the Armed Forces can be corrected if they are given financial power. This is not happening for a variety of reasons – including the unwillingness of those supposed to take decisions. Who should be blamed for, say, lack of snow boots for the soldiers in the mountains of Kashmir – the Commanding Officer or the concerned Joint Secretary? Our Armed Forces are the only ones in the world unable to spend the budget allotted every year. The three Services surrender money to the Finance Minister at regular intervals. Here lies the crunch. This explains all the issues of governance of those in uniform.
