On December 8, India’s Chief of Defense Staff General Bipin Rawat led a dozen staff members to Tamil Nadu. His helicopter crashed into a mountain due to heavy fog, killing 12 of the 14 people on board instantly. The highly burned Bipin Rawat and his entourage were rushed to hospital but died of their injuries.
The untimely death of the first Indian military man sent shockwaves through New Delhi, with many mourning and counting the troubles he caused while still alive. The military reform of the backward-minded chief of defense staff had long brought criticism in military circles; his outspoken and atypical views also angered many in India’s military, official and diplomatic echelons. And now that Bipin Rawat is dead, will the effects of his death pass? Will New Delhi put an end to or undo some of the useless work that came about because of him? All these questions need to be answered.
The top official who triggered the discord in the Indian Army
At the level of Indian military reform, Bipin Rawat’s idea of consolidating the Indian Army from 17 commands into five theater commands has offended the Indian Air Force and Navy, with the second largest mountain of the Indian Army, the Indian Air Force, reacting particularly strongly to it.
Bipin Rawat, a top army officer, held an army-centric view in the process of integrating the Indian Army, and his idea of building the army followed the “cold start” theory of Krishnaswamy Sundarji, a senior Indian army officer, after Sundarji’s “strike army After Sundarji’s unsuccessful “strike force” plan, he transformed it into a relatively small but more compact “integrated battle group.”
Such a brigade-sized unit stationed along the India-China and India-Pakistan borders would be commanded by a major officer, with infantry, air defense, armor, and logistics units, with helicopter gunships, and with combat capabilities against chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. To further facilitate the completion of such a force, he then began to draw manpower and equipment from various Army units and the Air Force to begin reorganization. The plan’s lack of information warfare and cyber warfare elements has been criticized by the military community.
After officially launching preparations for the four theater commands in 2021, Bipin Rawat had already split the armor of the three major Indian “strike armies” (i.e., the 1st, 2nd, and 21st Army Groups) to reorganize on the front line, and when this splitting plan fell on the head of the Indian Air Force, the second largest hilltop of the Indian Army had reservations about it. In addition, Bipin Rawat even made statements in July that “the IAF is a support force for the ground forces” and that it is “a support force” for the Indian Army. Such statements, which ignored the strategic and tactical capabilities of the air force, also led to strong opposition to the reform proposal from the IAF chief of staff (equivalent to the commander) down. By September 2021, the IAF was still resisting the theater joint command proposal.
In the IAF’s view, the army-born chief has been at war with himself ever since he was promoted by Narendra Modi to be the first person below the defense minister and above the tri-service chiefs. Under the new military reform plan, the Indian Air Force, which like the Indian Army has seven commands, will be streamlined and split. One of its core assets, the 42 fighter flying units, would be cut to just 30, and would be further broken up by theater and frontline force configuration around the country to provide support to ground forces.
As Modi and Bipin Rawat’s new military reform program encourages the Army to receive uniformed and paramilitary forces from the Ministry of Home Affairs, i.e., “Indo-Tibetan Border Police” and “Border Security Force,” the IAF may further transform itself into an army aviation force or something like that because of the needs of these frontline forces stationed along the India-China and India-Pakistan borders, which is unacceptable for the air force that was previously on par with the army.
In addition, after the IAF’s chain of command was integrated into the “theater command,” the original seven air force generals in charge of air bases around the situation also no longer existed, the new theater commander will only be reserved for five generals of the three armies, although Bipin Rawat and his military reform team established a new Ministry of Defense system. Although Bipin Rawat and his team have created a new “Department of Military Affairs” (DMA) within the Ministry of Defense, which is accommodating the redundant general officers of the three services, the existence of a bed-and-breakfast relationship between the DMA and the Indian Ministry of Defense does not change the prospect that the Indian Air Force will be hit hard by the “military reform. And while Bipin Rawat’s death will not easily change that course, and General MM Naravane, who is expected to be the next chief of defense staff, may still have a bias against the air force, the IAF can always mourn in mockery while privately rejoicing in the fall of its enemies.
A drummer for two-front warfare
As for Bipin Rawat’s influence on the situation around him, this may be a more dramatic topic: He has been creating a “two-front war” atmosphere for India since 2017, and now that atmosphere has finally become a reality thanks to the “efforts” of the Indian Army.
According to information, Bipin Rawat has been a staunch advocate of war since the India-China standoff in Doklam in 2017. In a speech at India’s Center for Ground Warfare Studies (CLAWS) in September of the same year, Bipin Rawat pointed out that India is still at risk of war along the Sino-Indian and Sino-Pakistani borders. He determined that India must be wary of war with China and that there was no room for reconciliation with Pakistan during the same period, and that “Pakistan will take advantage of India’s concerns about China to act,” but Bipin Rawat did not offer a countermeasure or a solution.
From there, Bipin Rawat began to make a lot of noise in New Delhi about a “two-front war” and became famous for it. By the end of 2019, he again warned India to be “ready for a war with China and Pakistan at the same time. By 2020, during the Galwan night battle and the Pangong Lake standoff, Bipin Rawat followed Modi and others to the front line, declaring that China was “trying to change the status quo on the Line of Actual Control on the border during the New Crown pandemic” and that India “needs to be highly prepared on land, at sea and in the air. ”
During the 2020 China-Pakistan Air Force joint exercise, Bipin Rawat continued to reiterate the “two-front warfare” and used it to showcase the results of his own military reforms, saying “the Indian Armed Forces have sufficient strength and reserves to deal with any threat and are seeking to arm themselves with more sophisticated technology.” After the change of government in Afghanistan in September 2021, Bipin Rawat also said that China may show “aggressive behavior” on the Indian border and will soon intervene in Afghanistan, and borrowed from the “clash of civilizations theory” that ” Chinese civilization is joining hands with Islamic civilization (i.e. Pakistan) against the West”, a statement that embarrassed Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar, who went to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit at the same time, and specifically stressed to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that “India has never endorsed the so-called clash of civilizations theory.”
Shortly before Bipin Rawat’s death in the helicopter crash, he was actively emphasizing in the media that China was India’s number one enemy and that New Delhi was going to win the support of the U.S. and Russia in exchange for war with China and “would not hesitate to use force whenever necessary. The day before his crash, he was meeting with South Asian foreign ministers, stressing the need to deal with “biological weapons” and talking about the “Chinese origin of the New Coronavirus”. And now, with this tireless speaker’s fate at his throat, the military, political and especially diplomatic circles in New Delhi can finally breathe a sigh of relief.
In fact, in the face of Bipin Rawat’s death, many in the Indian military and political circles have the feeling that “the general did a good job, but similar work should not be done again.” For example, Pravin Sawhney, a leading Indian military scholar, argued that the New Delhi authorities should not elect the next chief of defense staff, and that New Delhi should re-evaluate the rationality of Bipin Rawat’s military reform aimed at liberating the army, and that its abolition would be the ideal choice. But whether New Delhi can accept the general effect of Bipin Rawat’s uselessness and admit its mistakes may be another question. Source