Conspiracy of silence

Deepak Sinha

A veteran paratrooper and a senior Visiting Fellow with the Peninsula Foundation in Chennai, Deepak writes on matters of military and broader security concerns. His blog Para Phrase will seek to unravel issues in the security domain without fear or favour, mainly from a military perspective.

These past few weeks, one sound you may probably have heard, is that of feces hitting the fan. This has been so ever since the Army has been at the receiving end of actions by Pakistani terrorists in the Jammu region, South of the Pir Panjal Range. Clearly, Pakistan is bent on disrupting the forthcoming local elections and re-energising the dying insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, just as it did more than two decades back, but whether they would go as far is moot. Mainstream media anchors and assorted analysts have suddenly woken up from their deep slumber and are frenziedly voicing concerns and discussing what ails the Army and what needs to be done. The question that remains is why have they crawled out of the woodwork now and why didn’t they speak up when the government was busy flushing the military down the toilet?

While the Pakistani establishment may have once again succeeded in blindsiding our security and intelligence establishment, it must be emphatically added that, at the end of the day, their game plan will not succeed. Despite what prophets of doom and gloom proclaim from their YouTube channels. As the Army scrambles to redeploy and reinforce this Sector, it does find itself in a difficult bind as troop commitments in Eastern Ladakh and significant deficiencies in manpower, due to the implementation of the wretched Agnipath Scheme, start to bite. The resulting curtailment of unit peace tenures will be tough on the affected units, personnel and their families as it tends to undermine capabilities, adds to stress levels and impacts morale and motivation. Despite this, it is only a matter of time before the Army is able to fine tune its operational strategy, deploy the resources needed and neutralise this threat. Hopefully, jungle bashing by the infantry and Rashtriya Rifles, as of yore, will not be the norm and Special Forces, aviation and surveillance assets will be used to the full. 

However, that does not take away from the fact that in this sector alone there have been eight encounters till date since Nov 2023. In these, 20 personnel have been killed in action, including three officers, and several more injured with very little to show in terms of success. Notwithstanding the fact that success and failure in such operations are two sides of the same coin, in which luck is an important factor, to be repeatedly outmanoeuvred tactically time after time is truly concerning. While it would obviously be foolish to speculate on what transpired tactically at the sub-unit level without the benefit of all pertinent facts, one cannot help but conclude that there is a systemic problem for which the blame lies elsewhere. 

 The biggest problem dogging the military, for ever so long, has been the fact that our politicians have little idea of matters military and show complete disinterest in strategic affairs and the geopolitical complexities surrounding the issue of national security. Their superficial understanding of these matters has resulted in the military being kept in a state of neglect, out of the decision-making loop with their advice ignored by successive governments. They are seen of use only when the situation has gone completely out of the hands of the government as has been the case in Punjab, Jammu& Kashmir and the North East. In this context at the present time, Manipur is a case in point. 

It is public knowledge that since May 2023 violence has embroiled the state to such an extent that it can be considered close to a civil war as the State has long lost control. While militant groups roam around freely with weapons, the Army and the Assam Rifles have more or less being restricted to their camps, their wings clipped and subjected to a series of indignities and humiliations. Yet, since 2023, till date, the Prime Minister has yet to visit the State despite having travelled extensively, making over 180 trips around the country and including seventeen abroad, apart from the Ambani wedding, ofcourse. It is just a matter of time before the situation there goes over the brink and the army will once again have to be called in to regain control, but at what cost?

Even far more damaging has been the political leadership’s belief that the military’s utility has been severely constrained, if not rendered irrelevant, as chances of a conventional conflict have greatly diminished with the advent of nuclear weapons in the region. A belief given considerable boost by the Army leadership’s almost single-minded focus on counter insurgency operations, at the cost of all else. This resulted in stagnant budgets, mandatory troop cuts and the acquisition of new weapons drying up, leaving large voids in personnel, weapons and equipment holdings.  A natural corollary to this sharp decline in the military’s importance was that it also provided an opportunity to the politico-bureaucratic nexus to cut it down to size.

Tampering with its internal institutional processes, customs and traditions, interference in Selection Boards and reduction in their pay and perks, thereby adversely impacting their traditional inter-se parity vis-à-vis the Group A Services. The final nail in the coffin has ofcourse been the Agnipath Scheme that reduced training durations and drove a stake into the heart of the regimental system. A decline greatly accelerated by an ideologically compatible and compliant military leadership that was put in place by the Modi Government. Today, we are seeing the fallout of these debilitating policies that have debilitated the military over the years. None of this would have happened if objections of military veterans had been heard and issues highlighted by the media.