“Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason”.
Minor English poet John Harrington said it ever so perceptively more than 400 years ago and earned his place in history. Lincoln was more categorical. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), he thundered that Congressmen who “wilfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermines the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung”. This is indeed most apposite to present-day India as we will see later, although this writer does not quite advocate the last form of punishment.
Now that the former PM is facing criminal charges in court, Indians have woken up to the old adage that no one, however powerful, is above the law. This is not to pre-judge the professor, since the nation’s judicial system might well exonerate him, but all citizens have now seen that India’s former chief executive will soon be having his day in court.
Given this backdrop, there are some other very disturbing developments about which all of us should introspect. If we take the clock back to November 13, 2013, a most interesting event happened. The former Army chief, General V K Singh, who had hung up his boots on May 31, 2012, under very unusual circumstances, sent a complaint to Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, asking for stringent action under various provisions of the IPC, Official Secrets Act (OSA) and National Security Act (NSA) against a number of accused, including senior journalists in various newspapers, and a former three-star general who had attempted to bribe the chief a few years earlier.
Singh’s complaint listed details of the numerous offences committed by the accused, including the leakage of highly confidential letters written by him as Army chief to Defence Minister A K Antony and the PM. These “scoops” appeared in a few newspapers but got widely circulated thereafter. The most serious charge levelled by Singh related to the disclosure of the existence and operational details of a highly secret agency of the Army that had been set up in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai attack, at the behest of the National Security Advisor.
This unit, the Technical Services Division (TSD), was a covert organisation whose sole objective was to carry out operations within the country and abroad that are essential for national security. Every country worth its name has units like this, working under cover and in total secrecy, so as to protect the country’s safety and neutralise attempts by hostile forces to attack it. The TSD’s operations directly helped our military forces deployed on the border. By revealing its existence and casting aspersions about its reliability, these concocted press reports in 2012-13 effectively killed off the TSD. In any case, General Bikram Singh, who succeeded Singh, wound up the TDS and saw to it that its key officers, who had served the unit and the country so selflessly and courageously, were branded as rogue elements and treated ignominiously and disgracefully. More on this later.
Shinde, not surprisingly, sat on the complaint of Singh. One doubts whether the latter could realistically have expected anything better from the same coterie that had used every means, all foul, to cut short his tenure by a year. Not only was no action taken by Shinde but the self-canonised Antony also played his scripted role in this shabby theatre of the absurd. The woman IAS officer who had leaked the “eyes-only” letter from Singh to the PM (on the lamentable state of preparedness of the Army and the serious equipment shortages faced by it) was merely transferred to her home state. In the US, a similar crime would have meant 25 years to life in a federal penitentiary. In China, it would have been a bullet in the head, but we are clearly a vastly more tolerant country, at least as far as wrongdoing by babus and netas is concerned.
Readers will remember that the government at that time (read the Congress, its chosen babus and law officers) had come up with the pernicious doctrine of a “line of succession” in the appointment of a Services chief, as if India is a one-horse monarchy like Liechtenstein. This policy prevailed, since the UPA lot went out of its way to back this insidious gibberish. Despite the change in Raisina Hill, this charade continued and Bikram Singh was duly succeeded by the present chief, General Suhag.
Why should we be worried? Because the oldest trick in history is to demoralise and divide the armed forces of your opponent. The Germans did it successfully twice, with France in the Dreyfus case, and the Soviet Union in the Marshal Tukhachevsky saga. And the Pakistanis read the same books as we do.
The spin-meister presswallahs, Antony and Shinde have all got away clean, while the former TSD officers are still being hounded. Will Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar and the PM do the honourable thing now and sort out the mess?
jay.bhattacharjee@gmail.com
The author is a corporate laws and business analyst, based in Delhi