Opinion General thoughts on BRICS summit

Sadly,India’s prestige didn’t go up in the eyes of the visiting dignitaries or of the international community in general,because the BRICS summit was overshadowed by an unseemly domestic controversy,for the timing of which the army chief is chiefly to blame. One hopes that he was aware of the importance of the summit for India. Why then did he choose such a time for precipitating a controversy that made India’s position awkward at the BRICS summit? The very act of a serving army chief giving media interviews,of the kind that Gen V K Singh did,is grossly inappropriate. No less inappropriate was his earlier act,wholly unprecedented in the history of India’s Armed Forces,of dragging the government to court over the issue of his date of birth. Did he enhance the nation’s honour,or the honour of the Indian Army,with these two egregious acts?

Ominously,his letter to the prime minister on India’s defence preparedness was leaked to the media on the eve of the BRICS summit. Gen Singh may be telling the truth by claiming that he had nothing to do with the leak. But can he absolve himself of the responsibility of creating an atmosphere of persistent tension and turmoil at the top rungs of India’s defence establishment,which some malcontents within the establishment could easily exploit,possibly with the aid and abetment of certain foreign forces out to weaken India? For let us not fool ourselves into thinking that foreign intelligence agencies are sitting quiet and doing nothing to know about the happenings in the labyrinth of India’s power structure.

To say all this is not to absolve the scam-ridden UPA government of its share of blame in sustaining a messy controversy that could prove life-threatening for it. A strong prime minister,backed by a strong defence minister,would have handled this matter very differently—swiftly and correctly. He’d have shown the door to any officer who didn’t accept the government’s decision,since there is simply no scope for defiance in such matters. At the same time,a strong prime minister would have used his power to ensure,through deterrent actions supplemented by constant monitoring by his office,that the top echelons of the government and the defence establishment remain out of bounds for wheeler-dealers and for firms trying to sell low-quality and high-cost products. Besides insisting on transparency,integrity and accountability at every level,a strong and visionary prime minister would also have given a big paradigm-shifting push to swadeshi in defence production,acting on the conviction that India’s honour,sovereignty and very survival as a free and secure nation depends on maximum indigenisation in military needs.

Why do I mention swadeshi in this context? For three reasons. Firstly,as highlighted by the bribery-related allegations made by the army chief—the amount he has mentioned is only a tip of the defence-procurement iceberg—there is too much money at stake in an area of public spending which is not subjected to any meaningful public debate either in or outside Parliament. Marketing of military hardware has been the biggest corrupter of political,bureaucratic and defence establishments all over the world. The swadeshi spirit will surely obviate this by bringing greater transparency and commitment to the nation’s interests. Secondly,it will question,halt and reverse the trend of India spending shocking amounts of money on buying foreign military hardware. What we reasonably need for our national security,we must resolve to produce ourselves to the highest extent possible,by faithfully following a long-term plan of promoting indigenous industries. Thirdly,swadeshi spirit (in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi championed it) also enjoins upon India the duty to promote demilitarisation of international relations,so that all countries,especially the big ones (India included) spend less money on military and more on development and people’s welfare. Therefore,if BRICS leaders are honest about wanting to create a genuinely new world order,one which is different from the old order hegemonised by those nations whose economies today largely depend on exports of war machines,they must take the lead in collectively demilitarising global economy and politics. When that happens,our future generations will see,among other things,less episodes of the murky kind that have rocked our defence establishment in recent times.