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Defence ministry AK Antony gags Army, Navy, Air Force
NEW DELHI: The defence ministry has directed the Army, Navy and IAF to restrict their interactions with the media to the bare minimum, in what is being interpreted in military circles as a gag order.
Sources said defence minister A K Antony in a confidential communication earlier this month to the three Service chiefs - Air Chief Marshal P V Naik , Admiral Nirmal Verma and General V K Singh - virtually asked them to scale down the interface with journalists across all ranks.
While refusing to "divulge the contents of the communication" in question, MoD officials said the aim was to curb "loose comments" that create "needless problems" for the government.
"No one in the military should speak out-of-turn on contentious issues or policies which are still being formulated," said an official. Despite repeated attempts, Antony himself could not be contacted to explain the rationale or the immediate provocation for the directive.
The diktat, however, comes in the backdrop of the military leadership in recent days speaking about the Indian armed forces also being capable of launching an Abbottabad-like operation as well as the need for New Delhi to remove the existing 5,000-km cap on strategic missiles and develop ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) with strike ranges of 10,000 km and beyond.
For instance, Pakistan had torn into Gen Singh's remark that the Indian armed forces were "competent" to carry out an operation similar to the one conducted by US SEALS to take out Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad in early May.
While Army was quick to clarify that Gen Singh had merely responded, without naming Pakistan, to a query about whether India too had surgical strike capabilities, Islamabad had sharply warned New Delhi that any such "misadventure" would lead to a "terrible catastrophe".
MoD's directive to the armed forces, of course, once again brings to fore the sheer disconnect between its civilian and military wings despite all the big talk about "integration" between them. The military, on its part, feels slighted that "civilian control" has come to mean "bureaucratic" rather than "political" over the years.
"Indian armed forces have always been avowedly apolitical, recognizing civilian supremacy as a fundamental core principle. Top military leaders, rarely if ever, act as loose canons...but there is always this tendency to dub them just that," said a senior Army officer.
"If a mike is thrust in the face of a Service chief at a public function, should he duck the question to act completely unlike a military leader? Or, speak in a professional manner about his force, its capabilities and concerns?" he asked.
Defence ministry AK Antony gags Army, Navy, Air Force - The Economic Times
