Sabre-rattling Rawat exits

General Bipin Rawat, India’s first Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), who was killed in a helicopter crash on 8 December, was a four-star Indian military officer, had served as the 57^th Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee as well as the Chief of Army Staff.

Rawat was commissioned into the 5^th battalion, the 11 Gorkha Rifles, the same unit as his father, Lakshman Singh Rawat, who retired as Deputy Chief of the Army Staff in 1988 as a Lieutenant General.

He was revered by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his jingoism against Pakistan and China, as well as orchestrating numerous false flag operations. In June 2015, under the watch of Modi and his equally controversial National Security Advisor Ajit Doval while commanding the Dimapur based III Corps, Rawat first orchestrated the ambush and slaughter of 18 Indian soldiers, allegedly at the hands of militants belonging to the United Liberation Front of Western South East Asia (UNLFW) in Manipur. In a fake retaliation, it was claimed that the 21^stbattalion of the Parachute Regiment struck an Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K) base in Myanmar. The government of Myanmar denied any cross-border attack having taken place.

Emboldened by his earlier penchant for conducting false flag operations and orchestrating fake surgical strikes, while serving as the Vice Chief of Army Staff, Rawat staged the drama of the 18 September 2016 terror attack on the military camp in Uri in which 19 soldiers were killed. Pinning the blame on Pakistan, surgical strikes were allegedly conducted by Indian Special Forces across the Line of Control on 29 September. Pakistan nailed the lie by allowing national and international media to examine the locations of the alleged targets, which showed no signs of an attack. However, the gullible Indian media as well as hawks swallowed the fake story to massage their egos. As a result, the Modi-Ajit Doval duo, on 17 December 2016, appointed Rawat as the 27^th Chief of the Army Staff, superseding two more senior and capable Lieutenant Generals, Praveen Bakshi and P.M. Hariz. The appointment was declared politically controversial and unheard of in India, where seniority has generally been strictly adhered to in the tradition-bound military andthe side-stepping of two senior generals was unpalatable. Rawat was accused of nepotism and gratuitously politicising the appointment by senior serving and retired Indian military officers.

In 2017, Rawat’s sabre-rattling brought his country to the brink of war with its eastern neighbour, when at Doklam, a 73-day military border standoff happened between the Indian Armed Forces and the People’s Liberation Army of China over Chinese construction of a road in its own area near a trijunction border area between Bhutan, China and India.

In 2018, as Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat decorated Major Nitin Gogol, who had used an innocent Kashmiri youth as a human shield, with Chief of Army Staff’s Commendation Card and cited him for bravery. On 9 April 2017, Major Nitin Gogol had tied a Kashmiri youth to the bonnet of his jeep and used the young man as a human shield, while drving through the streets of Srinagar. An FIR was registered against the Major, but Nitin Gogol was praised by the Court of Inquiry for “presence of mind to avoid casualties or injuries”.

In September 2017, during a seminar in Delhi, Rawat said that “warfare lies within the realm of reality” along India borders with China and Pakistan, even though all the three countries have nuclear arms. According to critics Rawat neither prepared for such an outcome nor initiated measures to thwart it.

The 14 February 2019 false flag operation at Pulwama also bears Rawat’s stamp as following the 2017 attack across the LOC in Azad Jammu Kashmir, he had stated that he was not happy with the limited range that the Indian Special Forces had. In his view, Indian Special Forces had a long way to go before they could achieve deep penetration surgical strikes, like the one carried out by US Special Forces when they took out Al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011.

The failed surgical strike inside Pakistani territory on 26 February appears to be an extension of the same twisted thought process. To Bipin Rawat and his mentors Modi and Doval’s dismay, Pakistan retaliated the very next day, destroying two Indian Air Force fighter aircrafts, capturing one Indian pilot alive while another was killed. To add salt to the wound, in the confusion, Indian air defence targeted its own Mi-17 Helicopter with an Israeli-made SPYDER surface-to-air missile, killing the crew and six IAF personnel on board.

The ambitious Indian General even managed to scorn his sister forces, by putting emphasis on the ‘supremacy and primacy’ of the Indian Army over the Air force and Navy, in fighting wars. Rawat had stated, “Wars will be fought on land, and therefore the primacy of the army must be maintained over the air force and navy.”The statement had antagonised the two forces. In early 2021, Rawat called the Indian Air Force a “supporting arm” of India’s defence network and infrastructure. IAF Air Chief Marshal R.K.S. Bhadauria made a public statement in response that the IAF served a bigger role than a supporting arm.

Drawing no lessons from the 2017 Doklam standoff, Bipin Rawat’s forces suffered another embarrassment and mauling at the hands of Chinese forces in the 2020-2021 Galwan-Ladakh Sino-Indian skirmishes, when India tried to construct an unauthorized road across the Line of Actual Control into Chinese territory.

Seething with antagonism over China’s cool response in the Galvan incident and teaching Rawat’s war-hungry followers a lesson, General Rawat—on 15 September 2021 while speaking at an event in the capacity of the CDS at the India International Centre in New Delhi—touched upon the theory of clash of civilizations with regards to the western civilization and China’s growing relations with countries like Iran and Turkey. The next day, on 16 September 2021, India’s Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar, apprehensive of a retort by Beijing, conveyed to his Chinese counterpart that India does not subscribe to any clash of civilisations theory.

A hardened ally of Modi, Rawat had been criticized by the opposition party leaders for making political statements during the Citizenship Amendment Act protests.

How ironic that the General who welcomed the 5 August 2019 illegal annexation of Indian Occupied Kashmir and Ladakh, and had threatened to change the DNA of Kashmiris, died in such a fiery crash that DNA tests had to be carried out to identify the victims.

The writer is the former Group Captain PAF and an author.