It is surprising that my friend Shekhar Gupta, who not long ago said, “In no other major democracy are the armed forces given so insignificant a role in policy making as in India. In no other country do they accept it with the docility they do in India”, has opined that this show of “defiance” is bound to result in a civilian riposte to take away some autonomy of the future chiefs. That cannot be ruled out. But does it mean that the chiefs should never raise or question issues that are so obviously wrong, unjust and bound to have serious impact on the morale of their services? If that be the desirable trait amongst senior officers then I will go one step further and state that such armed forces will never be able to win wars.

Sometime ago, former Defence Minister Jaswant Singh wrote in his book Defending India, “A combative mentality has grown between the service headquarters and the ministry. Such an attitude has its own damaging consequences; the defence ministry, in effect, becomes the principal destroyer of the cutting edge of the military’s morale; ironic considering that the very reverse of it is their responsibility. The sword arm of the state gets blunted by the state itself. So marked is resistance to change here, and so deep the mutual suspicions, inertia and antipathy, that all efforts at reforming the system have always floundered against a rock of ossified thought.”

The problem is that on the pretext of establishing civilian political supremacy over the military, we have developed a system of bureaucratic control, the like of which does not exist in any other country. If the military loses confidence in such a system, or gets isolated from the policy planning and decision-making process, it would affect its psyche, ethos and capability to advise and perform.

... contd.