Seeking Utopia in Uniform

Kudos to Sierra69 for the blog “Senior Leadership is culpable too”. This is certainly a discussion material in the seminar “How to strengthen the junior leadership” provided we are able to dust off the cobwebs from our conditioned thinking. A paradigm shift in our approach to command is required, more so at the CO level. A similar blog written by Maj Navdeep, articulating similar sentiments has appeared in indianmilitarybenifits.blogspot.com. Excerpts are as under: -

"How we behave with our own people becomes a benchmark for others to emulate in life outside the cantonment. While we tend to compare our status, stature and salaries with other services, isn’t there an underlying negativity in behavioural patterns being displayed with impunity by us ? Are we setting the right example for others to follow or sending the right signals ? Are we projecting our service as a hallmark of pride of the nation ?. The answer is definitely in the negative. Our internal organisational behaviour ultimately extends to how we are treated by the outside world and we definitely need to improve on how we interact with our own. 

There is no dearth of examples as to how we dig our own graves. How often do we see more than one Commissioned Officers being bunched into below-status single rooms in Messes on the ground of non-availability. I, for myself have seen situations where ample accommodation is available but still officers being asked to stay in small living spaces on the pretext that the (abundant) vacant accommodation is a contingency back-up for (imaginary) ‘VIPs’. Do we see the same on the civil side ? Do we see SDMs who are equivalent to Lieutenants of the Army being asked to live and stay in rooms like we do ? Never. Often we see junior officers being asked to travel in heavy trucks despite the availability of respectable light transport, why do we do this? Do we expect people outside to be impressed by a strapping young Captain in Combats sitting in a Three Tonner ? Do we, by this action, attract youngsters to join the services ? No amount of ‘Do you have it in you ?’ campaign would work unless we bring the pride, the glamour and the respectability back into our uniform and the so called ‘baboos’ are not responsible for this, the problem lies closer to us than we think – each of us is to blame. 

Honour has no rank. A Subaltern is much more capable than merely looking for an apt place to put the shamiyana in the Mess lawn. That Subaltern’s civilian counterpart - an SDM or an Addl DC/DM with the same education and from the same recruitment pool, looks after the revenue, executive, administrative, law & order and quasi-judicial functions of an entire sub-division and sometimes even a district and we are not even able to trust our own guy with a Light Motor Vehicle !How we behave and conduct ourselves outside ultimately has an indirect effect on how people in uniform are perceived and it percolates down to the last rank in the file."