General in a labyrinth
Resignation is the honourable course for the army chief
Now that General V K Singh is on foreign shores for a while, the controversy over whether the commander of the world’s second-largest army was born in 1950 or 1951 appears destined for a quiet burial. And now that the Supreme Court has dismissed his petition challenging the government’s rejection of his demand for a reconciliation of his birth date, General Singh can be expected to retire in May this year, just as he was supposed to do when he was appointed chief. With that, the uncertainty over his successor has ended, and many believe that, with the Supreme Court having rapped both the government and the general on their knuckles – indicating that the dispute should never have been brought before it in the first place – the odds are even. But should the matter rest here?
True, the government has withdrawn, at the Supreme Court’s behest, an order rejecting Singh’s demand for a reconciliation of the two birth dates that were recorded by different branches of the military. General Singh has also been the victim, possibly, of some amount of red-tapism. But recall that when he moved the Supreme Court in January this year, he made the muscular statement that he was taking this singular step as a “matter of honour”. This is in spite of the fact that his petition specifically requested the Court to grant “all consequential reliefs” after ordering the reconciliation of his dates of birth. If it is a matter of honour, now that the Supreme Court has spoken, surely the honourable course of action will be to resign. Indeed, it is practically imperative that he do so, given the Supreme Court bench of Justices R M Lodha and H L Gokhale roundly criticised General Singh for going back on two earlier commitments to accept 1950 as his birth year. The first was in 2008, when he was promoted to army commander, and the second in 2010 in an undertaking to the then Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Deepak Kapoor when he was in contention for that post. Given that peacetime army promotions are based on seniority, it is untenable that General Singh should have accepted his promotion to COAS on the basis of a 1950 birth year and then expected to retire on the basis of another, a year later.
General Singh’s subsequent lobbying via the Prime Minister’s Office and through the Right to Information route for a later birth year and retirement hardly behoved the integrity that he claimed he sought to protect — and also irresponsibly undermined civil-military relations, always fraught with tension. Justices Lodha and Gokhale also said General Singh should have acted gracefully. That advice is particularly apposite since the general’s actions have dragged the army, already shadowed by several corruption cases, into an unseemly and divisive controversy. That it eventually morphed into a stand-off between the government and the defence forces marks an undesirable precedent, one that it is incumbent on General Singh to bring closure to by leaving office with grace.