Commanding the world’s second largest Army, deployed along two long unresolved borders with nuclear-armed neighbours even as it combats insurgency in the hinterland has never been easy, but New Indian army chief General Bikram Singh will have it even tougher, Indian media analyses on Thursday.
When he took over as the 25th chief of the 1.13-million Army on Thursday, facing him will be a force beset with factional feuds and competing lobbies, discipline and corruption problems, crippling operational gaps and modernization delays.
Gen Bikram Singh will also have to grapple with the sharpened civil-military divide left behind by his predecessor Gen V K Singh. When the outgoing chief came to office in April 2010, he promised to restore the Army’s “internal health” but actually ended up embarrassing the government with endless controversies, even dragging it to court over his age.
Insiders say Gen V K Singh did “indeed shake up the system”, not necessarily a bad thing considering the string of status-quoist chiefs the Army has had, and cracked down on corruption. Defence minister A K Antony’s rush to now fast-track long-delayed Army projects, for instance, is a direct result of Gen V K Singh complaining to PM Manmohan Singh of “critical hollowness” in his force’s operational capabilities.
“But you can’t usher in meaningful reform by acting like a bull in a china shop,” said a top officer. Gen V K Singh, who had never earlier served in South Block except once as a major, instead antagonized the entrenched politico-bureaucratic combine like never before. This, in turn, put the skids on several Army projects and policies, from transformation to procurements.
So, Gen Bikram Singh, who has had six tenures in South Block after he was commissioned into the Sikh Light Infantry regiment in March 1972, will have his hands full. His topmost priority, as he himself admitted in an advance interview to Sainik Samachar, will be to enhance the Army’s operational readiness and ensure modernization.
But with around 100 modernization projects for artillery, air defence, night-fighting, aviation and the like currently stuck at different levels, he will need to learn a lesson or two from the Navy and IAF on how to revamp his procurement wings as well as push projects through the labyrinths of South Block.
Indian Army, incidentally, has itself calculated it would need around Rs 41,000 crore just to make up its existing shortfalls in ammunition and equipment. The force, in fact, will take several years to reach 100% operational capability despite the critical need to “enhance the combat ratio versus China” and “upgrade the combat edge against Pakistan”, as also cater for the worst-case contingency of a simultaneous two-front war.
Another key priority will be to “strengthen the Army’s work culture and the core values, namely duty, honour, loyalty, integrity, respect and selfless service”, Gen Bikram Singh said.
This again will take some doing since the Army’s once-pristine image has taken a huge battering in recent times, with the violent clash between officers and jawans of an artillery regiment in Nyoma sector in eastern Ladakh in early-May only serving to reinforce the declining standards of discipline and leadership in the force.
“We have to focus on effective human resource management to ensure high standards of motivation and morale among all ranks,” Gen Bikram Singh said. He will certainly have to show “tact, dexterity and large-heartedness” to heal the fissures which have erupted both within the Army as well as between the force and the civilian leadership, say insiders.
Literally, the task before Gen Bikram Singh is “transformation”. Gen V K Singh did begin “transforming” the poor teeth-to-tail ratio Army into “an agile, lethal, versatile and net-worked force”. But it got derailed during his contentious tenure. Gen Bikram Singh will have to kick-start it, without recriminations and bad blood, to effectively meet the challenges ahead before he retires in July 2014.
