LAHORE: Although Lt Gen P K Rath becomes the first serving three-star general of the Indian army to face court martial, the world’s largest democracy and the second-largest standing army had earlier brought corruption charges against a good number of its top-ranking serving military officials like Lt Gen Avadesh Prakash, Lt Gen Ramesh Halgali, Lt Gen S K Dahiya, Maj Gen Anand Kapoor, Maj Gen Hooda, Maj Gen P Sen and Maj Gen Chopra etc.
Employing over 3.77 million men comprising 325,000 regular troops, 1,155,000 reserve troops and 1,293,300 paramilitary troops, the Indian Army has also taken to task the likes of Lt Gen Avadesh Prakash, Lt Gen Ramesh Halgali and Maj Gen P. Sen for fraud in the Sukhna land scam in West Bengal’s Darjeeling district along with Lt Gen P K Rath.
Apart from the Sukhna real estate rip-off, the other afore-mentioned two and three-star Indian generals have faced charges ranging from sexual molestation to possessing property disproportionate to their known sources of income.
It is noteworthy that the provisions for summary courts martial were not introduced into the regular Indian army till the mutiny of 1857, though the British themselves had such a system in place since 1689 when the first Mutiny Act had recognised the legality of the military courts.
History has it that a 1279 statute of King Edward I of England had given the Monarch the right to command all the military forces of the nation. The royal prerogative had also accorded the Crown the power to regulate and discipline the army.
A journey through the history of American armed forces reveals that the most famous Court Martial in the land of Columbus was that of General William Mitchell (1879-1936) in 1925, the man after whom Milwaukee (Wisconsin State)’s Airport and a famous American military aircraft (B-25) were named.
Regarded as the father of the US Air Force, General Mitchell was one of the most famous and most controversial figures in the history of American airpower. Having commanded all US air combat units in France during the First World War, General Mitchell had annoyed many people in the US Army after he had dubbed them incompetent before the House of Representatives.
General Mitchell was reverted to the rank of a Colonel in 1925 and was court-martialled for seven weeks on charges of insubordination. In October 1925, he was charged with eight specifications on direct orders from President Calvin Coolidge, accusing him of violating certain Army regulations.
The court martial had begun in early November 1925 and on December 17, 1925 the court had found General Mitchell guilty. He was suspended from active duty for five years without pay, though the then US President Coolidge had later amended the order by ordering half-pay for the general, who had resigned from the service shortly afterwards on February 1, 1926.
In the US Army history, the July 1952 Court Martial of Major General Robert Grow is also very famous and widely-quoted. General Grow was charged with compromising the classified security information of his country. Actually East German agents had got hold of General Grow’s personal diary, resulting in his court-martial.
General Grow, who had commanded armoured division in World War II, had stayed at a Frankfurt-based US Army guesthouse that employed German personnel.
Grow was charged with displaying poor judgment by keeping a diary that contained classified information without taking proper precautions to secure it.
In Pakistan, the most significant court-martial in recent history was that of Maj Gen Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi (1943-2009).
Accused and convicted for seven years in 1995 for being party to the coup against the second Benazir Bhutto regime and the then Army Chief Waheed Kakar, Gen Abbasi was serving as Director General Infantry Corps GHQ at the time of the incident.
After the plot was uncovered by the then chief of general staff Gen Jahengir Karamat, Abbasi was arrested and sent to Haripur Jail.
Another co-accused in this case, Brigadier Mustansir Billa, also had to face court martial and was convicted for 14 years, after a co-conspirator Qari Saifullah had turned approver and testified against the two high-ranking officers.
Lt Gen Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi (1915-2004) had sought his own court-martial to prove his innocence in the 1971 East Pakistan debacle. Though he was never formally charged, he was subsequently relieved of his position in the Army.
General Niazi, as commander of Pakistan armed forces in the East Pakistan, had surrendered his 93,000 men to the joint forces of India and Bangladesh’s Mukti Bahini. He was severely criticised and held responsible by many within the Pakistan military for having surrendered his forces.
Also blamed by the Hamoodur-Rehman Commission Report for massive human rights violations in Bangladesh, Gen Niazi had always insisted that he had acted according to the orders of the military high command.
In 1988, soon after the infamous Ojhri Camp catastrophe, The Indian Express had claimed that a military probe committee had recommended court martial of senior Pakistani generals, including the then ISI chief Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman.
Giving details of the episode, The Indian Express had reported: “Two committees were formed by the government to look into the affair. The first was the military committee headed by a serving general. This committee’s findings and recommendations were ignored since it called for the removal of General Zia’s right-hand man, Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman, along with other senior military officials. Its report, presented within one week of the incident, was rejected.”
The prestigious Indian daily had further stated, “Another more interesting committee was the one set up by Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo. This was a political committee headed by a Cabinet minister and comprising four federal ministers. Controversy surrounded the findings of this committee. The members could not reach consensus on who was responsible for the Ojhri tragedy. In his remarks, the head of the committee, Aslam Khattak (probably the minister for interior then) had concluded, `No one was responsible. It was an act of Allah.’
The Indian Express concluded saying, “However, the minister of state for defence, Rana Naeem Mehmood, a hawk in the Junejo cabinet and a diehard proponent of democracy, prepared a non paper which was signed by three of the five members of the political inquiry committee. The paper recommended the court martial of senior generals and laid the blame on Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman. Many believe that this paper had actually cost Junejo his government.”
A few years ago, a PML-N stalwart Siddiqul Farooq had alleged that Gen Pervez Musharraf had actually overthrown the second Nawaz Sharif government in 1999, after a Pakistan military inquiry committee had recommended court martial for the former Chief of the Army Staff’s role in the Kargil debacle.
Releasing a White Paper on Kargil War then, Siddiqul Farooq had claimed that Musharraf wanted to take over in the first week of August 1999, but he had to hold his horses till October.
