Not only was this a source of considerable distress to Grenadier Yadav's family, it proved to be a major embarrassment for the Army, especially since Yadav was recuperating, not in some small town hospital, but in Delhi under the very nose of the Army's top brass. Of course, once they came to learn of the faux pas, Army Chief V.P. Malik and his colleagues rushed to visit Yadav in the hospital with gifts and words of encouragement, but such public relations exercises can hardly be expected to undo the enormous damage caused by the initial carelessness. The Army Chief has now instituted an inquiry into what went wrong. It is to be hoped that it will yield a better explanation than the one offered by the official spokesman of the Army who had the temerity to term it as a ``typographical error''.

There is another lesson that needs to be imbibed here. It just does not pay to rush through with such matters. Recently, there has been a certain enthusiasm to cash inon the Kargil euphoria for political and commercial gain. The Army too perhaps felt pressurised to recognise and reward their courageous soldiers in time for Independence Day, when the Kargil exploits were still fresh in people's minds. But allowing public opinion to dictate matters as serious as this is always fraught with risk. In normal circumstances, awards of this kind go through an extremely elaborate process of checks and counter-checks. Once the commanding officer recommends a name and prepares a citation honouring a particular soldier, it is scrutinised at various levels -- ranging from the divisional headquarters, on the one hand, to a high-level committee headed by the Vice-Chief of Army Staff, on the other. This time, clearly, the whole process was given short shrift and the names of the awardees processed in a matter of a few days. The result was an ugly gaffe that, ironically enough, comes in a year that has been designated as the `Year of the Soldier'.