It is an uncomplicated requirement. To get the right answer, you have to ask the right question. This simple fact often seems to escape the curious or even the querulous. In 2011 India’s single-minded Army Chief V K Singh informed our high-minded Defence Minister A K Antony that a brother-officer, Lieutenant-General Tejinder Singh, who retired as head of defence intelligence agency, had offered him a bribe of Rs 14 crore. Tejinder Singh was senior enough to have been a candidate for army chief himself, stark proof of spreading venality at the top of an institutionally honed pyramid. This was fish rotting from the head, not mid-level grease shared with smooth arms dealers and oily politicians. The army chief clearly had this bribery conversation taped, possibly because he suspected what its contents would be, and wanted a record. There was always sufficient basis for investigation in order to discover in which other directions this rot had travelled.
Antony raised a shocked hand to a fevered brow. Then the moral minister and the martial chief decided to cover up this nasty episode in a blanket of silence.
Why?
Antony’s official, weak and limp answer is that he did not receive any written complaint from General Singh. But there was no written complaint in March 2012 either. This time around, the general spoke through the press, and more than once when his initial salvo failed to hit. Did Antony order a CBI enquiry because he suddenly became interested in the truth or because he was unnerved by the slosh of muck beginning to swirl around his feet in the middle of a parliament session? Ironically, a confidential enquiry in 2011 would have protected the image of the armed forces. Has, then, the CBI been set up to play a charade? Antony argued that General Singh did not want the matter pursued. So what? The defence minister takes the decisions in our democracy. It was his call. He chose to collude with the army chief in the grey zone of silence.
It takes one side to smash a silence. But why did General Singh discover his conscience this March after having put it into cold storage for a year? Was it because the government refused to change his date of birth and give him a 10-month extension? Would he have been such a cheerleader for honesty if the government had buckled before his self-promoting campaign, which he described as a “question of honour”? How honourable is it for an army chief to leak secret letters he has sent, in his official capacity, to the prime minister on military readiness? Did he discover that India was “unprepared” only on March 12, when he sent his letter, because he wanted to embarrass a government that had denied further tenure? He is still wearing his uniform: Does he have any respect for it?
It is in the nature of this variable animal called the human being to pay out the highest interest to self-interest. Honour is the abdication of self-interest to the larger good. It is, consequently, the bedrock value of institutions like the defence forces, critical as they are to the integrity and stability of the land we call our motherland. Parliament also considers honour a fundamental virtue. It is still the correct form to address those who have taken the oath of office in government as “Hon’ble Minister” (I don’t know either why there is an apostrophe in the first word, but maybe no one was ever certain about the accolade). Experience has, however, shown that honour seems to have flexible norms. Shakespeare’s Mark Antony taunted Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar, for losing the difference between honour and betrayal. (Our defence minister, incidentally, is named after the Christian St Anthony, not the polytheist Roman general.) An old proverb bemoans that there is honour even among thieves, evident in the protective pact of silence.
We have reached a point in public life where the only definition of culpable self-interest is theft and bribery. But betrayal of the code of honour, the parade of lies, deception and overreach can be as, if not more, damaging. General Singh is untainted by allegations of financial corruption. Perhaps this has led to an unconscious sense of superiority, enhanced by the usual coterie of sycophants, which persuades him that his campaign of revenge is burnished by some moral horizon. If the damage he has inflicted were merely upon himself, it would have been a sorry enough sight. But he has also hurt India’s proudest institution, the armed forces, and thereby the nation itself.
Antony has spent a lifetime making a virtue of placidity. If you do nothing except wring your hands, your hands are unlikely to get dirty. But there are occasions when indecision is a crime, and crime tends to seek punishment. Antony has been stirred, but not yet shaken. A cloud has darkened the halo that was his preferred headgear. And the weather has not cleared.
The columnist is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and Editorial Director, India Today and Headlines Today.