That Gitchy Feeling....

Of late, I have a terrible gitchy feeling coming on, about the state of the Republic of India. For those of you who dont know what it is, Jeff Smith describes it in his works, as a sixth sense that something bad is going to happen.

The army, navy, and airforce are going through an unprecedentedly bad period. For some reason or the other, the traditional image of the Armed Forces as protectors and heroes has been purposely dented in the media, and the minds of the people, through a variety of scandals (real/imagined/or manufactured), on TV, whether they be Srikant Purohit, or Avadesh Prakash, the armed forces are not being spared by the media, which appears to have been told to bruise them as much as possible.

The pay commission has done such terrible damage to the morale of the armed forces, that one wonders whether it wasnt engineered by those inimical to Indian interests. Given the recent arrest of a Group B IFS officer for being in the pay of the ISI, it isnt hard to imagine that someone might have been paid off for arranging this blow to the military's morale. Everything seems to be for sale in India today. And the Mir Jaffers are apparently having a field day.

Meanwhile, the fabric of Indian society is slowly, but surely being corrupted and destroyed. Instead of acknowledging that caste is not a factor for most people anymore, the government of the day (UPA-II) seems to want to cause caste frictions, to try and ensure that traditional vote banks dont disappear. Take the 50% reservations in educational institutions, government jobs, and goodness knows what else, just as a simple example.

Fear is the order of the day. Terror attacks go off in Delhi with the regularity of a well oiled colon. Naxalism is spreading like a cancer, and inept, yet influential police leaders are insisting that they can handle things, and not letting anyone else get a grip on them. Our neighbours are making full use of the confusion that ten years of UPA rule will cause, and have reactivated links with the Sikh insurgent populations in Canada and USA and UK. The Chinamen are getting tough on the borders, and ISI is resurgent in so many ways.

But the root cause of all this, is the blow to the morale and esprit de corps of the armed forces, which has been ongoing for many years now. Until the morale of the soldiery is not restored, all manner of enemy will act tough. Because they know we are weak.

Officers are quitting the army at an alarming rate. And why shouldnt they? They have been humiliated by the civil servants often enough. Theyre sick of IAS District Magistrates in their 20's telling Colonels old enough to be their fathers, "we are senior to you".

The government (read political leadership) has failed to maintain a proper equation between all govt servants, and has allowed the armed forces to be run roughshod over.

Result? The officer corps' morale is in the gutter. What comes of that? Our enemies are encouraged. The sheep themselves have hobbled the sheepdog, and the wolves are out for blood.

Will we let this keep happening? Lets wait and see.