Bipin Rawat's Unfinished Agenda

The untimely death of the chief of defence staff leaves his successor with the challenge of finishing India’s most significant military reform since Independence. The task ahead for the new superchief

- Sandeep Unnithan

Rajpath, the ceremonial boulevard leading up to Raisina hill, is a buzzing construction site these days. Earth-movers are at work round the clock to build the Central Vista, a new home for the central government, replacing the British-built North and South Blocks nearby. In the basement of South Block, the office of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), there is still a sense of shock and disbelief. It has been this way since the horrific December 8 helicopter crash which killed India’s first CDS General Bipin Rawat, his wife Madhulika, two helicopter pilots, his security detail, and his personal staff, including his military advisor Brigadier Lakhwinder Singh Lidder. India’s topmost defense officer, General Rawat was steering the country’s most significant military reforms till date. These include welding 17 disparate single-service commands into five fighting formations called theatre commands, overhauling a dysfunctional military hardware procurement system and boosting indigenous arms manufacturing. He also had the uphill task of preparing the armed forces for a future war where the enemy (read China) would fire the opening salvoes with cyberattacks, shutting down India’s power grids and air and ground transportation nodes rather than mounting a frontal charge on the mountains. “In the future,” General Rawat said in his last interview to India today (see ‘We do not accept change…’), “you will not even know that war has started.”

On December 10, General Rawat was given a solemn military funeral in the heart of the Delhi cantonment—a 17-gun salute, political leaders across the spectrum and thousands of people in attendance. It was, as several veterans noted, a sendoff the government of the day denied Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw in 2008.