Tough and blunt, General Rawat was widely admired in the armed forces and broadly popular with the public. But he was at times controversial
General Rawat was no ordinary serviceman. The 63-year-old was India’s highest-ranking uniformed officer and the first to serve as a joint chief of its three military services. The role was created in 2019 as part of reforms intended to modernise and streamline one of the world’s biggest and most tradition-bound armed forces. Part of General Rawat’s mission was to break down the divisions among the army, navy and air force and create instead a cohesive central command.
Despite inevitable speculation, the crash appears to have been accidental. The Indian army operates more than a hundred such aircraft, often in trickier circumstances. The payload, weather conditions and terrain posed no special challenges. “It is natural to look for causes,” says Ajai Shukla, a defence analyst, “but very often a crash can happen within full compliance.”
General Rawat will be quickly replaced, most likely by the most senior of the current service heads, army chief of staff General Manoj Mukund Naravane. Tough and blunt, the deceased chief was widely admired in the armed forces and broadly popular with the public. But he was at times controversial. In 2016 Narendra Modi, the prime minister, selected him as army chief over the heads of two more senior generals.
Only a few days before the fatal crash, Indian soldiers again invited criticism for human-rights offences. According to army spokesmen, commandos in the far north-eastern state of Nagaland had received reports that guerrillas were using a road not far from the border with Myanmar. When a pickup carrying a group of men approached the soldiers on December 4th, they claim they warned it to stop, opening fire when it failed to do so.
Indian politicians and pundits are in general very protective of the armed forces. Even so, General Rawat’s successor will face mounting pressure both to complete structural reforms and to improve performance—including respect for the rights of other Indians. At the same time, and despite growing external threats, the army will continue to face what may be its oldest and most intractable foe: stingy budgets.
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