From VK Singh to the CIC, everyone is a loose cannon

If Gen VK Singh were in office as Army chief today, rather than the retired soldier that he is, would he have staged a coup? That’s what Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra seems to be insinuating — without, of course, explicitly using the ‘C’ word. Mishra said he was “intrigued” by Gen Singh’s recent demand, along with Anna Hazare, for the dissolution of Parliament on the grounds that the UPA government was not abiding by the Constitution, reports Indian Express. Noting that if the government had accepted Singh’s claim in respect of his age (over which there had been a controversy), Singh would be “our sitting Army chief,” Mishra said that if “this kind of an idea” — that the government and the Parliament needed to be dissolved — had implanted itself in the mind of an Army chief, “I shudder at the thought, that what would have been the way to achieve that end?” What Mishra is obviously insinuating, without saying so explicitly, is that if Singh were in office as Army chief today, he would have acted on his inner conviction that the government was not abiding by the Constitution, and would have toppled the government, perhaps by staging a coup. And Gen Singh would have done it in the (mistaken) belief that he was acting to preserve and protect the Constitution, which is the excuse that all Army chiefs who overthrow governments — as happens so often in our regional neighbourhood — trot out. [caption id=“attachment_520348” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  For someone who had only recently stepped down as Army chief to lend his name so soon to a quasi-political movement targeting the government does reek of impropriety. PTI[/caption] Mishra may, of course, claim disingenuously that he wasn’t suggesting that Gen Singh would have a staged a coup if he were in office today. After all, that’s the line that the Indian Express took famously to defend its explosive report in April , which too insinuated, without using the ‘C’ word, that some “unnatural” troop movements in mid-January had unnerved the government into thinking that Gen Singh, then locked in a bitter dispute over his age, was mobilising troops to dislodge the government. After the Indian Express report was roundly trashed for the veiled suggestion of a ‘coup’, the newspaper defended itself by claiming that it had never used the ‘C’ word, except to mean ‘Curious’. It was a too-clever-by-half argument, a bit like suggesting that the “ Bhag Bhag DK Bose” song in the film Delhi Belly was really about a Bengali babu who was on the run. In much the same way that the Indian Express report, for all its claims to having been a dispassionate narrative of ‘curious’ events as they happened, was patently a hit-job on the Army chief. Allegedly planted by the government agencies to discredit the Army chief who had taken the government to court, CIC Satyanand Mishra today exaggerates the implications of Gen VK Singh’s statement on the unconstitutional of the government by suggesting that he would have had a coup on his mind if he were in office today. Gen VK Singh’s statement is, of course, open to criticism on other counts. For someone who had only recently stepped down as Army chief to lend his name so soon to a quasi-political movement targeting the government in a high-decibel fashion, and calling into question the government’s abidance by constitutional norms, does reek of impropriety. Although the Army is not immune to politics, for an ex-Army chief to throw himself actively into the political waters and take aim at the government he was serving until a few months ago amplifies that sense of impropriety. That impropriety is worsened in Gen VK Singh’s case given his record of strains while in office. Singh rightly blew the whistle on corruption in the Army, and in fact the problems relating to his age record were vitiated by his dogged pursuit of corruption in the armed services. But by going to court on the age dispute while still in service, Gen Singh did contribute in some measure to the breakdown of relations between the Army and the government. Which is why his post-retirement comments about the unconstitutionality of the government have acquired a keener edge than they otherwise might have. A compelling case has been made that there must be a moratorium of a few years before key constitutional authorities — from the Army chief to the higher judiciary to top bureaucrats to officers like the CAG and the Chief Election Commissioner — join active politics or even just accept appointments to commissions and tribunals after retirement. After all, it is just as improper for judges and bureaucrats and Army chiefs to accept appointments on commissions and tribunals immediately after they retire as it is for them to take to active politics. A media investigation established earlier this year that most top retiring bureaucrats and judges took up appointments on commissions and tribunals — in some cases even before they formally retired from service. As BJP leader Arun Jaitley pointed out, the “clamour for post-retirement jobs” was adversely affecting the impartiality of the judiciary. “When I was a Minister, I would be wary of meeting retiring judges for fear that he would hand me his bio-data,” he said. The same can be said of bureaucrats too: too many of them accept post-retirement appointments too soon after they retire, which can give rise to legitimate doubts about their sense of rectitude while in service. Satyanananda Mishra himself is an IAS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre who retired as secretary in the Department of Personnel and Training in 2008, but was appointed as Central Information Commission the same year. So, yes, there are improprieties at many levels when Army chiefs and judges and bureacrats don’t abide by a “moratorium” before taking up post-retirement appointments or entering active politics. Gen VK Singh was surely conducting himself with all the subtlety of a loose cannon when he publicly called the constitutionality of the government into question. But Satyananda Mishra too is being just as much of a loose cannon with his wild (even if unstated) insinuations that Gen VK Singh may have staged a coup if he were in office today.