Indian Navy: Personnel and service matters
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Internal enquiries
Apr 08 2015
NEITHER COURT, NOR MARTIAL - Questions swirl over Navy's internal inquiries
Josy Joseph
Question to sailor Rakesh Kumar: Who are the officers for whom special requests were made?
Answer: CNS (chief of naval staff), VCNS (vice chief of naval staff), DCNS (deputy chief of naval staff), COL (chief of logistics), COP (chief of personnel), Cmdr OP Kaura.
Question to Commander Girraj: Were you in the knowledge of these special requests being catered from Store Victualling Yard?
Answer: Yes sir, this was briefed to me by my predecessor and I continued to follow it.
In the normal legal course, such answers, as given to a naval Board of Inquiry (BoI) would have resulted in summons to the alleged beneficiaries. But not in Indian Navy . It dismissed them as “wild allegations“ and punished the sailor who allegedly took bribe from a contractor, and a couple of middle-ranking officers who were his supervisors.
Such selective implementation of justice is not an exception in the Navy but widespread, a TOI investigation has found.
According to proceedings of several BoIs, some recent orders of Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) and the Supreme Court and several sources, the BoIs of Navy , and court-martials based on them, often use skewed and legally unsound processes to arrive at conclusions. In the process careers, reputations and even family lives of many middle rung officers and sailors have been ruined. Most of them have gone silent, struggling to rebuild their lives.
In cases where affected personnel fought back, Navy's decisions have been overturned.In just the last few months, the AFT has ordered the navy to take back two sacked commanders. The Supreme Court threw out Navy's challenge to one of those tribunal orders.
Last summer, a BoI was ordered after sailor Rakesh Kumar posted with INS India, which provides administrative and logistics support to the Naval headquarters, admitted to taking bribe from a meat supplier, after accounting irregularities emerged. During questioning, the sailor admitted that discrepancy was not just limited to meat procurement, but also in vegetables and fruits. When questioned, he said it was “made to cater for the special requests of VIPs“.
Kumar named most of the Navy brass, including then chief Admiral DK Joshi, then vice chief and present navy chief Admiral Robin K Dhowan, then deputy chief and present eastern command chief Vice Admiral Satish Soni, and many other senior officers.
The BoI immediately turned to Kumar's superior Commander Girraj, who admitted to the manipulation.
The BoI, headed by Captain Sriram Amur, did not summon, or record statements, of any of the senior officers named as the beneficiaries of the manipulation. More over, the BoI report was submitted to chief of personnel Vice Admiral P Murugesan, one of the alleged beneficiaries of the procurement system that was under probe.
Asked why the BoI did not probe the alleged beneficiaries, the Navy in a written response to TOI said: “The indicted individuals had admitted to their wrongdoings. However, the said indicted individuals raised wild allegations on other senior officers and cast baseless aspersions in an attempt to cover up their own misdemeanours.“ The statement said: “Having examined the case in its entirety , the BoI may not have felt the necessity to summon any other witnesses.“
