Five years after the ignominy of the 1962 Sino-India conflict, one of the men blamed for India’s defeat, Lieutenant-General B.M. Kaul, came out with his memoirs, The Untold Story. The book gave his version of the 1962 operations in which he first served as the Chief of General Staff and then took over the command of the newly-raised 4 Corps in the eastern sector where the Indian army suffered a humiliating rout. Kaul had resigned after the military defeat but when his book came out, it caused a furore in Parliament.
Many members of Parliament asked whether Kaul had sought prior permission from the government to publish it or had submitted the manuscript to the government before its publication. When the then defence minister, Swaran Singh, replied in the negative to both queries, some MPs demanded Kaul’s arrest. Singh then clarified that defence personnel need to seek permission to write a book only when they are in service. “But after their retirement, no permission as such is required. But the law of the land still prevails, namely the Official Secrets Act, and anything which comes within the Official Secrets Act will be an offence and as such actionable under the Official Secrets Act,” he added.
The law hasn’t changed since, but the political environment certainly has. Four Stars of Destiny: An Autobiography, the memoirs of General M.M. Naravane who retired as the army chief in April 2022, was to be released on January 15. The author and the publisher had made the announcement and the book was available for pre-order. But as soon as certain excerpts from the book were released by a news agency as part of the publisher’s promotion strategy, the Narendra Modi government stalled the release of the book. The tentative date for the book’s release is now April 30 on e-commerce portals.
Some chapters of the book have been given to the external affairs ministry while the army headquarters is reviewing the other material. Unlike an order issued by the Modi government in 2021 to bar retired bureaucrats, diplomats and intelligence officials from writing anything without prior approval, there is no such bar on retired military officers. They are only bound by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, which they sign as having read on the first day of every year when in service.
Naravane is not the first retired army chief to pen his memoirs. It is hard to imagine that he is neither aware of the provisions of the law nor sensitive about revealing information that can jeopardise military operations. Most memoirs of retired government officials contain revelations that are interesting; some disclosures have even embarrassed governments. But such books get published freely even if they sprout a political controversy. That is the norm in any functioning democracy.
Based on the extracts, Naravane’s recounting of the decision-making process around the Agnipath scheme — the controversial arrangement for short-term contractual recruitment of soldiers announced in June 2022 — seems to have ruffled feathers in the Modi government. The former army chief writes that his proposal was only for a 10% recruitment of soldiers for five years on same terms as regular soldiers but this was converted by the Prime Minister’s Office into a new scheme that mandated 100% short-term contractual recruitment of soldiers into the three defence services at a monthly salary of Rs 20,000 for a period of three years.
"This was just not acceptable," writes the former army chief. "Here, we were talking about a trained soldier, who was expected to lay down his life for the country. Surely a soldier could not be compared with a daily wage labourer?" This led to an increase in the starting salary to Rs 30,000 per month but the army’s insistence on retaining 75% of the short-term contracted soldiers was rejected by the government. Even a proposal for 50% retention by General Bipin Rawat was not accepted by the political leadership which argued that only 25,000 demobilised Agniveer soldiers returning to society every year was too little. People in the know say that the current army chief, General Manoj Pande, has moved a case for 50% retention with the government late last year but has not got the formal political approval so far.
More important is his revelation that for the other two services, the navy and the air force, the political direction for the Agnipath scheme “came like a bolt from the blue." Naravane explains that he needed some time to clarify to the other two service chiefs that his initial proposal had been specific to the army and that he, too, was taken aback by these unforeseen developments. For the air force, the three/four years' contractual engagement was insufficient to adequately train individuals in the technical skills essential for such tasks as repairs and routine operating and maintenance procedures for aircraft.
In November 2023, speaking at the army’s Chanakya Dialogue in New Delhi, a former navy chief revealed that the then navy chief, Admiral Karambir Singh, had rejected, in writing, the draft Agnipath scheme. But the scheme was still imposed upon the three services. More critically, the three service chiefs — Naravane and Singh had by then retired — were paraded in front of the media to take ownership of the Agnipath scheme. When massive protests broke out in many states over the new scheme, the military leadership was at the forefront of defending the unsatisfactory arrangement. None of the incumbent service chiefs has displayed the moral courage to state the truth. Instead, they have allowed the military to be used as a shield for an unwise political decision that is damaging for the armed forces.
The Modi government has deceived the public about the Agnipath scheme, portraying it as an idea of the military leadership for a ‘youthful profile’ for the armed forces. Their objections and the political impositions have never been revealed by the government. An RTI application seeking records of deliberations on the Agnipath scheme was rejected by the defence ministry, arguing that the files were classified as “secret”. The word, 'secret', is nowhere in the exemption clause of the RTI Act under which information could be denied to an applicant. Instead of passing specific orders, the Central Information Commission has only asked the ministry to either "provide the revised information or reply as per the applicable exemption of the RTI Act.”
Naravane’s revelations do not violate the Official Secrets Act. They nail the untruths in the political narrative about the short-term contractual recruitment of soldiers at poor wages. The general demonstrates, perhaps unwittingly, that the Modi government was apathetic to the aspirations of the youth who wish to serve in the military, ignored the recommendations of the service chiefs, and was unconcerned about the health of the armed forces as an institution. Going into general elections in a couple of months, the ruling party is in no mood to let this truth about the Agnipath scheme be known to the public before they press the button on the voting machines.
Naravane’s memoirs are unlikely to see the light of the day before the elections, lest they damage the ruling party in any way. This is not a formal banning of the book but a devious way of imposing censorship. The effect, in furthering ignorance and subverting democracy, is the same as the burning of books in Europe in the previous century. The warning lies in the words of the Jewish writer, Heinrich Heine, in Almansor, a play he wrote in 1821: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.”
Sushant Singh is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and Lecturer, Yale University
