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In the end Bhagwat may become a legend for the wrong reason

One month later, the unfortunate Bhagwat episode is being laid to rest though television discussions still go on. The Delhi high court has postponed the hearing of a PIL despite a similar PIL being dismissed last month in the Bombay high court. If the government succeeds in securing the dismissal of the PIL in the Delhi high court, with or without showing the admiral's records, Bhagwat's dismissal would have been settled. But it could still be raised in Parliament during the Budget session.

If the Delhi high court reviews Bhagwat's records and dismisses the case, the naval battle will formally have ended. But the PR battle, to separate the issue of the dismissal from the morass of emotion, has already been lost by the government.

Niloufer Bhagwat is now resigned to her husband defending his honour through his forthcoming book My Last Ninety Days She says she will not go to court, as she did in 1990, unless Bhagwat's pension is withheld. The government will not do this because according to an earlier Delhi high court ruling, a pension is meant for the family and not just for the individual. Further, no stigma accompanies the withdrawal of the pleasure by the President.

Besides kickstarting the restructuring process, the Bhagwat drama has yielded another positive result. The Supreme Court has said that matters of sensitivity such as promotion "should not be debated in courts" and has advised the government to evolve a mechanism to deal with such matters outside the courts. This informal advice came in the hearing of the Lieutenant General R S Kadyan case. Lt General Kadyan had obtained a high court order quashing the appointment of the Eastern Army Commander in Calcutta, Lieutenant General R S Kalkat, which was stayed by the Supreme Court. The latter accepted the undesirability of the selection process of army commanders being questioned in court. Unfortunately, there is an earlier apex court judgment ruling that courts have the jurisdiction to intervene.

In fact, in 1992, in another landmark case of appointments -- filed by Lieutenant General V P Airy and debated over three weeks in the Delhi high court -- Justice Sunanda Bhandare also noted that courts were loath to adjudicate over internal matters of the armed forces. She too advised the government to settle the matter with the army.

Whether the Supreme Court comment will dissuade service officers from rushing to courts or act as a disincentive for courts themselves to admit such cases is doubtful unless two other associated issues are addressed by the armed forces and government. First, the promotion system must be reformed where necessary to make it appear fair and just. This will require banishing political or bureaucratic interference, which in turn would preserve the sanctity of promotion boards, chain of command and authority of service chiefs. Second, there is urgent need to set up service tribunals to deal with cases of injustice.

The lessons of the Bhagwat case reflect the growing gap between the political executive and the armed forces, the feeling of relative deprivation among the services in decision making, the self-imposed hegemony of civilian bureaucrats and other institutional failures. All this at a time when the military feels they are the most stable pillar of democracy.

Not many serious-thinking persons who understand the working and ethos of the military would be supportive of Bhagwat's act of defiance, tantamount to disobedience of orders. Fewer would say he showed spine. The entire episode is an aberration, the roots of which can be traced to Bhagwat's infamous writ petition of 1990, which rests on law rather than military traditions and ethics.

Over the years one of the main complaints of the service chiefs is they do not have access to the prime minister and that the latter has no time for them. While the service rulebook has kept open this channel of communication, practice and experience have proved otherwise, especially when the prime minister, after the Bofors scandal, has also been his own defence minister. A request to meet the prime minister is generally relegated to a meeting with his principal secretary.

Until 1964 the Cabinet Defence Committee where service chiefs were invited took care of this. At least then, the military voice was heard in the highest policy making Cabinet committee on defence and national security.

Today, the political military interface has been reduced to a farce. The committee of secretaries, headed by the Cabinet secretary, is the apex body which service chiefs attend. In the absence of a permanent chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee or a Chief of Defence Staff, the key advisor to the prime minister and government can only be a service chief. This prerogative cannot be usurped by any secretary to the Government of India. These anomalies have to be corrected to institutionalise the political military interface and define the role of the defence bureaucracy.

The defence secretary may be the butt of many service jokes, but invariably he is the one who has the last laugh. Because he wields without any accountability, real power. The letter signed jointly by the three service chiefs to the defence minister last year, complaining about then defence secretary Ajit Kumar's abrasiveness and non co-operation was unprecedented. On the basis of that letter alone, he should have been removed.

But the decision or recommendation to dismiss Bhagwat was not that of the defence secretary, but the defence minister. George Fernandes has earned his spurs in the defence ministry and is a hit with the jawans. For him, Siachen has become the agni pariksha. In ten months he has done a great deal to revive institutions and improve the lot of the jawan.

The fall-out of Bhagwat's dismissal is the demand by ex-servicemen like the Indian Naval League, the 1947 batch of officers and the group of six senior officers, for urgent reforms and restructuring.

Whoever evoked the reason of security risk in Bhagwat's dismissal had obviously not heeded the lesson from specifically naming China as the raison d'être for the nuclear tests in the letter to President Clinton. In the end Bhagwat may become a legend for the wrong reason.

Major General Ashok K Mehta