A sub-level performance

Dinesh Kumar

India’s questionable military capabilities and deficiencies in weapons and weapon platforms, the country’s over-dependence on imports for the armed forces, higher defence (mis)management, vulnerabilities along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with Chinese-occupied Aksai Chin and Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the  lack of respite from anti-terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir dominated much of the discourse on defence in 2014.

The year exposed the vulnerability of the three services, all of which (unprecedentedly) got a new chief in 2014. While the year was marked by a series of negatives, there were also a few positive developments, which, however, are expected to fructify only over the next few years. These included raising of the FDI to 49 per cent and clearing several long-pending proposals of purchase and manufacture of defence equipment. However, with much of the equipment assigned for indigenous manufacture, there are doubts on how realistic this is considering that an import-dependent India has no real capability for manufacturing high-end defence equipment.
The most spectacular incident was the resignation by the Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Devendra Kumar Joshi, a highly distinguished officer, following a fire aboard INS Sindhuratna, a Russian-supplied submarine, in which two officers died and seven sailors were injured. The resignation, the first ever by a service chief to be accepted by the government (in 1959 former Army chief General Kodandera Subayya Thimayya was the first and the only other service chief to resign. He had withdrawn it later on former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s request), led to other questionable decisions — supersession of the seniormost Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, who sought premature retirement in protest, and the appointment of a Navy Chief with no previous experience of having headed an operational, or even a training command. It will go down as one of the lowest moments in the Navy’s history.
However, two positives for the Navy were its taking possession of the much-delayed Soviet-era aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, (formerly Admiral Gorshkov), the biggest ship at 44,500 tonnes to be so far inducted, and the beginning of sea trials of the indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant.
Then, for most part of the year (10 months and eight days to be precise), the Ministry of Defence was headed by a political executive engaged in a ‘holding operation’. For the first five months till the Lok Sabha elections were held in May, the outgoing UPA-II’s Defence Minister, Arackaperambil Kurien Antony, who, in any case, was known to be an overly cautious and slow decision-maker, remained virtually a figure head. Then for the subsequent five months, from May-end to the second week of November, the newly formed BJP government decided to assign the MoD as an additional charge to the newly appointed Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. It was only on November 9 that the government appointed an exclusive Defence Minister, Manohar Gopalkrishna Prabhu Parrikar, who incidentally has no previous experience of heading a union ministry, let alone have an understanding of defence.
In a long list of other negatives, the Indian Air Force (IAF), with its depleted fighter squadron strength, had to ground its entire fleet of expensive Russian-made Sukhoi-30 MKI multi-role fighters for a month following malfunction in the aircraft that had led to a crash. Indigenous Dhruv advance light helicopter was also grounded following a crash. In another embarrassing incident, the IAF also lost its first US-supplied C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.
In Jammu and Kashmir, the Army, which continues to be locked in Pakistan-supported low-intensity conflict, faced attacks from Pakistani soldiers and terrorists, along the LoC and within the state. In Ladakh, China’s People’s Liberation Army continued to make incursions and temporarily occupy territory in the Indian side of the Sino-Indian LAC before eventually withdrawing.
Finally, and most heroically, the Army and the IAF rose to the challenge of working in tandem to evacuate and provide relief to thousands of residents in J&K affected by unprecedented floods in September. All in all it was not a very good year for Indian defence but it did end on a ray of hope.