COUP-MAKER, spy, traitor, rampaging bull. Principled, steadfast, pathbreaker, rebel with a cause. Does India’s army chief, V.K. Singh, have one persona, or does he suffer from schizophrenia?

Gen V.K. Singh has two months left in his tenure as army chief. Almost every day brings forth allegations against him, grave enough to cause his summary dismissal. Unable to get India’s Supreme Court to rectify his date of birth in February, he was expected to resign. But he did not fade away.

Shortly afterwards he was accused of snooping on his boss, Defence Minister A.K. Antony. Antony asked civilian intelligence to investigate, lending the allegation initial credibility, but then issuing a terse denial. V.K. went further, naming Tejinder Singh, a retired three-star general, as the tattler, who he said had also benefited from the Adarsh housing scam.

Ten years on, the Kargil war continues to haunt India. A 31-storey high-rise called Adarsh (meaning ‘ideal’ in Sanskrit, ironically) was built in Mumbai in 2003, ostensibly for widows of the war. Only three flats went to them, the rest were allotted, allegedly at cut rates, to a host of dignitaries, including Singh’s immediate predecessor as army chief, Deepak Kapoor. When the scandal broke in 2010, Kapoor pleaded ignorance of the high-rise’s raison d’être, and said that he would return his flat.

V.K. had just become army chief then, and threatened to court-martial Kapoor, with whom he had already run afoul. Kapoor met Antony, and the matter was hushed up. But the Congress party fired its chief minister, of the state of which Mumbai is the capital, a punishment so rare that it begged the question why Kapoor was spared.

Already the world’s biggest importer of arms, India is projected to spend over $150bn in the next 15 years. The politicos sign on the dotted line, but the wheels of procurement are oiled by the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence. The military is consigned to an advisory role.

Set up after Independence as the steel frame of the nation, the IAS seems to have run aground. Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy recently ranked India’s bureaucracy as the worst in Asia, adding that it was responsible for corruption, with little accountability for wrong decisions. IAS officers are traditionally generalists, rotated from ministry to ministry.

Therein lies the nub of the mutual scorn that exists between the faujis and the babus of the defence ministry. The faujis feel that the babus know little about military affairs, that they fire over the shoulders of the politicians, and that they are faceless and feckless. The babus consider the faujis to be pit bulls, who must be leashed. They know that the military is not a prized career in India, whereas theirs is. Many IAS inductees attract dowries in crores.

The military is particularly hurt by its steep downgrade in India’s protocol ranking, in which military chiefs figure below the cabinet secretary, the head of the IAS. Quite often, the prime minister or the defence minister communicates with chiefs through a junior bureaucrat. Such was apparently the case when V.K.’s age petition was rejected by the defence ministry.

Many chiefs have endeavoured to correct the imbalance, but to no avail. V.K. is a different kettle of fish. After the snooping controversy, he revealed that he was offered Rs14 crores in bribe by the aforementioned Tejinder Singh. He says that he promptly complained to Antony, who counters that he asked V.K. to take action, but that V.K. balked. Why did Antony put the ball back into V.K.’s court? As the boss of both V.K. and the defence ministry, the onus was squarely on him.

Then came the leakage of a letter from V.K. to Manmohan Singh, delineating major deficiencies in India’s defences. India’s polity, believing him to be the source, clamoured for his head. Neither the defence minister nor the prime minister sprung to his side. It was only when V.K. threw down the gauntlet and called the leakage “high treason” that the cacophony abated.

V.K. would still not take the hint and quit. Lt-Gen Bikram Singh was announced as his successor as army chief well before his own tenure was to end. Rankling him further was his belief that the government squashed his age plea to benefit Bikram Singh.

V.K. obviously is not keen on the latter. He has blamed the Adarsh gang for targeting him. Top on his list is Gen Kapoor, who apparently V.K. considers close to Bikram Singh.

As if things could not get worse, the ‘C’ bomb has just been dropped on India: that two army regiments commanded by officers supposedly loyal to V.K. marched on to Delhi one night in January, that the prime minister was rudely awakened at the crack of dawn, that the troops were purposely bogged down with roadblocks and then ordered back. Was V.K. staging a coup? The denials came fast and furious, from the prime minister, the defence minister, and his ministry. No one has gainsaid the roadblocks or the troop pullback though.

First liar (birth date), then spy (snooping), then traitor (letter-leaker), finally coup-stager. Is V.K. all of this? Or is he something else, a fearless crusader, who even took on his own chief, Gen Kapoor, to remedy the rot in the army? Has he so unnerved the arms merchants and their dalals in the biggest bazaar in the world, that they are desperate to send him packing? Is he so obtuse not to realise that a coup in India will trigger a spate of mass protests?

Doggedness has always defined V.K. He first failed but subsequently topped the rigorous US Army Rangers commando course, becoming the only Indian to be inducted into the US Army War College Hall of Fame. Expect more fireworks in the weeks ahead.

sunil_sharan@yahoo.com