Modi's General

The Death of an Indian General Bipin Rawat may have averted nuclear war

It is usually the good people that have tragic deaths- elementary school teachers who shield their children from gunmen, Good Samaritans who jump in to save drowning people, the mom with three kids delivering meals for the elderly-all appear in reports of the worst accidents. Sometimes, although very rarely, bad people also die tragically.

This is what happened last Thursday. At a little after noon Indian Standard Time, a Russian made military helicopter carrying General Bipin Rawat, the top soldier in India, his wife and thirteen other people crashed in Connoor in the state of Tamil Nadu. A short cell phone video shot by a tourist shows the helicopter hovering low and ominous before it disappears in a swathe of clouds. A loud crash is heard seconds later. The life of General Bipin Rawat is over.

In the aftermath, Indian television which, since the takeover of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, doles out heaping helpings of rabid nationalism even on ordinary days, has been eulogizing the dead General. To listen to them one would think that the General was a jolly man with the soft heart of an overgrown Boy Scout. As funerary rites proceed, retired Indian generals have shown up on screen their hazy Zoom images reciting hagiographies; the time the General felt empathy for a paraplegic, or that other time he was nice enough to speak to a contingent of female soldiers.

The reality of General Bipin Rawat was markedly different. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi can be likened to a contemporary Hitler in the making, his hatred of Indian Muslims a parallel to Hitler’s revulsion of German Jews, then General Bipin Rawat would be his Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, let me remind you, was the man who came up with the idea of death camps. It turns out that Rawat liked the idea of camps too. In January 2020, not long after he assumed the “Chief of Defense Services” position Rawat delivered a speech in which he advocated the development of “De-radicalization Camps” where Kashmiri Muslims could be interned. “These people need to be taken out separately, possibly taken into some deradicalization camps” he declared with his usual vim and vigor. Rawat even spilled that “there are already de-radicalization camps going on in our country” a statement that others in the Indian Defense establishment then tried to walk back.

General Rawat however kept at it. If the Modi Administration was systematically passing laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act which demanded that Muslims (and only Muslims) provide identification papers that showed they were actually born in India and hence were “real” Indian citizens-Rawat stepped in to criticize innocent civilians who protested its passage. Rawat believed that the Indian Army (allegedly secular) should stay a primarily Hindu and be subject to the diktat of the triumvirate which included himself, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. Notably, the post that Rawat occupied was one that the Modi Administration created for him so that he could reorganize the military along the lines that would be useful to a Hindu nationalist India increasingly keen on provoking its neighbors.

Even before he took on this tailor-made position, Rawat “proved” himself to Modi by carrying out “surgical strikes” across the border into Pakistan in February 2019-a reckless incursion between two nuclear armed neighbors that appeared motivated by the ultra-nationalist BJP Government’s desire to get a boost in the approaching national elections. Not only did he want to provoke Pakistan, he was also the commander in Ladakh near the Chinese border and took hawkish positions In favor of carrying out offensive attacks against that neighbor. This is probably why the Indian media is blaming China for the crash of Rawat’s helicopter.

In 2018, when an Indian Army Major stationed in Indian-occupied Kashmir tied a civilian to the hood of his Jeep while it was being pelted by stones-Rawat said the Major was “entitled” to do so. In fact, Rawat went on to make the use of civilians as human shields a rule-saying that individual officers were entitled to do so based on the circumstances. When the United Nations issued a report decrying this and other draconian tactics, including torture and extra-judicial killings of innocent civilians-Rawat said that the report was “a selective compilation of unverified information” and “motivated” by other ends.

One of General Bipin Rawat’s loved sayings was the cliche that “offense is the best defense”. Forgivable if favored by an ordinary man, its frequent use by this crazed, Hindu nationalist General, was a warning to the world. If the already hawkish Hindu nationalists of Prime Minister Modi’s Administration weren’t terrible enough for the fate of peace in the subcontinent, the addition of a trigger-happy, Hindu nationalist General who advocated camps for India’s Muslims, thought nothing of soldiers tying them to hoods of their cars, were keen on starting wars-was a death knell.

It would not have taken much for General Bipin Rawat, wrapped as he was in Hindu nationalist vitriol himself to carry out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s orders for a nuclear strike against Pakistan or China thus initiating a nuclear war that would destroy the world. Heinrich Himmler-Hitler’s top military man did not die before he killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews, perhaps it is lucky that Fate intervened in the case of Modi’s chosen Man.