India’s army chief warns over defence-Letter Leaked

India’s top military chief has warned that the country’s tanks have run out of ammunition and its air defences are obsolete despite increases in budget defence spending, leaving it vulnerable to any external threats. The warning was made earlier this month in a leaked letter, published by a national newspaper, from General VK Singh, the chief of army staff to prime minister Manmohan Singh. The leak will come as an embarrassment to Delhi as it prepares to welcome heads of state for a summit of Brics countries starting on Thursday. In the letter, the general said the country’s tank fleet was “devoid of critical ammunition to defeat enemy tanks” and warned that air defence was “97 per cent obsolete”. He also outlined “woefully” ill-equipped special forces and “large scale voids” in surveillance in a region where India faces two “inimical neighbours” and a potent terror threat. These warnings, on the eve of the arrival of Chinese president Hu Jintao in the Indian capital, reinforce views held by some former national security advisers and other senior commanders that India is not preparing sufficiently for the rising military might of a more assertive China. The letter surfaced only days after India was declared by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as the world’s biggest importer of arms, surpassing neighbouring China. The think-tank estimates that India accounted for 10 per cent of global arms imports between 2007 and 2011. India, the world’s largest democracy, has an annual defence budget of $40bn, and is in negotiation with France’s Dassault for the supply of 123 jet fighters, worth about $20bn. A.K. Antony, the defence minister, confirmed the existence of the letter in parliament on Wednesday amid calls from the government’s allies for the army chief to be sacked. “The government is determined to do all that is needed to continue to assure the safety and security of India,” said Mr Antony, a trusted ally of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi. The parliamentary opposition, which has drubbed Mr Singh’s government for high-profile corruption scandals over the past two years, described the letter as “extremely disturbing concerning defence preparedness”. Gen Singh has become a highly controversial figure in recent weeks, and is widely viewed as an antagonist to the ruling party after a bitter row over his retirement. Gen Singh took the defence ministry to the Supreme Court in February after claiming he was a year younger than military records showed. He lost the case. This week, Gen Singh said Mr Antony had failed to follow up on the general’s earlier disclosure that he had been offered a $2.8m bribe to buy faulty trucks for the army. “Fiscal allocations [for the military] by themselves tell a partial story,” said Uday Bhaskar, a Delhi-based defence analyst. “Creating appropriate military capacity requires a certain degree of political commitment and institutional integrity that appear elusive in the Indian context.” “Decision-making remains paralysed since the major political parties have chosen to attack one another over corruption and transgression issues. As a result, India’s military capacity has glaring gaps.” Maroof Raza, a defence analyst, said India’s defence forces were falling victim to a confrontation with the nation’s bureaucracy. “The growing trust deficit between the army chief and the ministry of defence has led to a situation where the government and bureaucracy have decided to not let anything move,” he said. “Ours is a shocking state of affairs.”