JOIN USWhether the story surrounding the diputed age of Army chief General V K Singh is one of honour, as he claims, or of hubris, as the government’s actions have displayed, is now for the Supreme Court to adjudicate.
Last Friday, when the Supreme Court admitted General Singh’s petition seeking intervention of the country’s highest court of appeal to decide on a seemingly simple dispute, it appeared from the orders passed that the government had mishandled the issue that was allowed to quietly fester for several years.
There is no denying that not only has the dispute caused an embarrassment to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Army, it has, alarmingly, contributed to what many in the armed forces now openly describe as a civil-military conflict. Not surprisingly, bureaucrats manning the MoD in South Block hold a ‘querulous’ General Singh responsible for petulantly pursuing the matter to seek the benefits of an extended tenure.
Now that the Supreme Court, which, in its first hearing on February 3, stopped short of directing the government to rescind a December 30, 2011, order which had rejected General Singh’s statutory complaint, is seized of the matter, several Army and MoD documents will become public.
They can potentially prove awkward for both the doughty and determined general and the secretive and unforgiving bureaucracy. Although General Singh has denied that he is trying to cling to his position, documents, mostly letters exchanged between Army headquarters and the MoD, suggest that he did accept 1950 as his year of birth when it mattered the most -- during promotions.
To believe General Singh’s defence that he was pressured to accept that birth year would be naive, for the simple reason that he could have put service, honour and integrity before self at those critical junctures in his career when he rose from a Major General to a four-star general. Indeed, General Singh’s appointment by the Cabinet as Army chief was based on official records that listed 1950 and not 1951 as his year of birth.
In other words, he was not expected to serve the Army for three years. There is little to indicate that the MoD will oblige the general who, according to some official documents, has annoyed the government over his date of birth issue. The general has won round one at the Supreme Court, but the crafty and unrelenting bureaucrats may yet pull up a trump card from their rule book that would see him retire in May this year.