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News papers on Sunday July 13 reported yet another Indian Navy warship being involved in an accident. The missile corvette INS Kuthar was reportedly damaged after it ran aground at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Navy has ordered a Board of Inquiry (BoI) into the recent accident, which is the 15th such incident after the submarine INS Sindhurakshak sank on August 14 last year.
It was this string of accidents, especially the two serious ones on board submarines INS Sindhurakshak and INS Sindhuratna that killed five officers and 15 sailors, which led Admiral D K Joshi to "own moral responsibility" and resign as the Navy chief on February 26. The ruling UPA government appointed Admiral Robin Dhowan as the chief, after a gap of 50 days, superseding the then Western Naval Command chief Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, who also, as a consequence, put in his papers.
The soul-searching and debate that ensued concentrated on two specific areas of discussion. Firstly, the current state of the Navy, it’s material state, and also the training and preparedness of it’s personnel. Much of the debate in the public domain was likely ill-informed and speculative, and based on insufficient or peripheral knowledge. Within the Navy, numerous Boards of Inquiry and study groups have been examining material, maintenance, training, leadership and preparedness aspects with regard to ascertaining the reasons for the spate of accidents and incidents that have bedeviled the service in recent months.
No doubt they will result in numerous prescriptive recommendations, and measures will be put in place to ensure that such incidents do not recur. Steps will be taken to ensure improvements in the training of naval personnel, and the material readiness of it’s platforms. Armed forces, navies, the world over, have time tested processes to analyse and recover after setbacks and disasters, both in wartime as well as in times of peace. These will be set in motion.
The second area of intense and occasionally heated discussion and debate, for a while, related to apportioning blame and fixing accountability. The Navy, in addition to the resultant attrition at the top of its hierarchy, stripped at least three warship captains of their commands after the accidents. Numerous other disciplinary measures have no doubt been ordered too. The politico-bureaucratic combine, however, did not escape responsibility for ignoring the Navy's repeated warnings about its ageing submarines and ships. All articles in the newspapers, and repeatedly during TV discussions, the subject invariably raised issues pointing to the apparent callousness and indifference of the bureaucrats and the politicians involved in defence decision making.
This aspect of the unfortunate happenings, the apparent lack of bureaucratic and political accountability, was highlighted in a rather stark and pointed manner by the resignation of the then Navy chief immediately following the second submarine episode in Feb 14. In itself an extreme and unusual step, never resorted to in the recent past by the service head of any of our armed forces, his resignation instigated a heated, albeit short-lived, controversy regarding accountability in the higher echelons of the defence apparatus. Much was made in the press of ministerial inefficiencies and indifference in responding to the Navy’s repeated demands for spares and replacements. Numerous defence pundits and commentators repeatedly spoke on TV about financial, procedural and bureaucratic hurdles being placed in the way of ensuring adequate and regular maintenance requirements, to keep technology intensive warships and submarines battle-ready, or even just operationally capable.
This aspect was also subsumed into the rubric of “civil-military’ relations and the eternal debate regarding legitimate political control of the military in a democracy, as opposed to the de-facto and “illegitimate” bureaucratic control over the military in our current scheme of things.
The regrettable reality of the situation is that much of the blame for this state of affairs lies within the hierarchies of the armed forces themselves; in the Navy, it has been the indifference to be politically sensitive and media-savvy. Lack of tenure in sensitive positions of the higher defence organization (it is even worse in the Army and the Air Force), a rigid and inflexible attitude towards processes and procedures, being relatively naïve in political and financial matters, and an outdated contempt for “public relations” has resulted in the military, the Navy in particular, being totally “out of the loop” in the political and power firmament. This isolation from political power cannot itself be however be considered the only reason for the situation leading to the misfortunes of the Navy. But it all adds up.
Take “public relations” and “media issues” for instance. The Navy prides itself on “operations”…..as a result only peripheral attention and miniscule portions of finance and time and personnel are devoted to media aspects. The 15 or 16 naval accidents that the media has dutifully reported, as it ought, were not all of the same gravity and consequence. Some were indeed quite trivial. Could the Navy not have provided enough backgrounder briefings and publicity material, and those too, not only in response to incidents, but as an ongoing process of continuous education and publicity? Not necessarily “paid news”…… but good, solid information to clear misconceptions, and errors of magnitude and emphasis?
Even the matter of the wider public’s overall lack of understanding regarding the role and missions of the Navy can only be attributed to the Navy not having paid attention to the education of the general public in this regard, The lack of institutional connections to think-tanks, universities and schools…..even lay institutions of public discourse, is clear evidence of this neglect. This neglect has been sometimes rationalized by asserting that the Navy should avoid being politicized, or that it cannot afford to have its personnel too much in the public eye. Taking politicians and media persons only on jaunts at sea once in a while, do not leave lasting impressions, or provide enduring education and sensitization.
A wider public awareness would probably be the best route to the politico-bureaucratic machine becoming more aware of maritime issues. Right now, their indifference and apparent callousness stems out an inability (they after all are also part of the “general public”) to understand maritime, and specialized defence and technology issues, and the only way they can retain the levers of power is on matters financial. They cannot actually argue technology or security issues and therefore tend to “obstruct” based on the finance hurdles…..and these service headquarters find difficult to overcome. That unfortunately results in the wrong programs being guillotined from expenditure plans. It has not helped that the armed forces “pet” programs have occasionally been inadequately justified. Constant resort to “security” bogeys without educating them sufficiently causes a “Cry Wolf” inference in the bureaucracy, and results in programs being jettisoned or slowed down.
Mindsets need to be changed, and outdated shibboleths discarded if change is to be achieved. Pakistan and China are insufficient justification to assert all security hardware demands. The requirements of a changing multi-polar world are very different from strategies based on history alone. That however is a matter for another discussion.
Rear Admiral (retd) Sampath Pillai is a former CMD with Goa Shipyards and a Defence Strategist.