Be The Leak! Be The Tiger!

When an Army Captain in Bhubaneswar was thrown behind bars like a pickpocket and his fiancée — a young lawyer who knew the law by heart — was dragged by her hair, stripped, and kicked inside a police station, the news called it shocking. Soldiers called it familiar. A short clip, a flurry of noise, a string of ‘suspensions’ to pacify tempers. Then the same boots came back to the same desk, the same file slipped back under the table, and the message stayed behind: Stars on your shoulder don’t scare us anymore. In Mhow, the birthplace of a young officer’s first salute, two lieutenants and their friends were stopped near Jam Gate — robbed at gunpoint, one woman dragged into the dark while the same lieutenants, whose profession is to fight, realised the uniform they’d polished the night before wouldn’t protect them from local thugs with pistols. No patrol rolled out for them until the video hit the news cycle. In Patiala, a full Colonel — a man trusted to command men and machines that guard a border — had his arm broken like firewood in front of his teenage son by Punjab Police over a parking quarrel. Courts thundered, newspapers grumbled, the force mumbled about suspensions. And then the system went back to sleep.

These are not stray insults — they are reminders. Reminders that a uniform once feared and instinctively obeyed is now just cloth when the country sees it off the parade ground. And while soldiers watch these stories with a slow burn in the gut, the people who should be standing beside them in the worst moments — the civil system that works behind their walls — show how they protect their own. A young IAS officer gets slapped by a local goon in Bihar — by sunset, the entire block administration is downed tools, files frozen, the panchayat head in cuffs, no questions asked. When an IPS officer is jostled by a mob in Maharashtra, the police brass threatens riot charges before dinner. But when a Havildar is beaten to death by his neighbours while on leave, there’s no pen strike, no files frozen, no local leader swearing retribution for a soldier’s widow. Just the lonely echo of a bugle over his folded flag. This is how power tells you what it values — not through slogans, but through who it protects when the lights go out.

How did we become this? Not overnight. Not by chance. The slide was planned, piece by piece — in footnotes no one reads, pay tables no one outside the uniform bothers to check, ceremonial orders carefully tweaked behind closed doors. There was a time when the ceremonial Order of Precedence told the truth: a Lieutenant Colonel stood equal to a Senior Superintendent of Police, a Brigadier outranked a Deputy Inspector General, a Major General matched a Chief Secretary step for step. But one subtle adjustment after another turned that balance upside down. Today, a Colonel’s rank is formally equal to an SSP — not above. A Brigadier lines up next to a DIG. A Major General, commanding thousands of men and the power of force, stands on the same ceremonial rung as a Principal Commissioner of Income Tax, who can delay a file but never fire a shot. It’s not about the line on paper — it’s about what that line says to everyone who must stand when they see the stars: They don’t outrank you anymore. You do.

Pay slips finished what the ceremonial tables started. The Fourth Pay Commission’s “rank pay” cut the ground from under thousands of officers’ feet, bleeding crores over decades before grudging courts stitched a fraction back. The Sixth Commission handed civil services Non-Functional Upgradation — an automatic step up the ladder for just staying in the chair long enough — but left soldiers outside that door, even though soldiers serve where there are no chairs at all. The Seventh kept the walls firm. An IAS officer can rise four pay scales in thirteen years. A Major can count out his Siachen days while his pay drifts behind a city clerk. The “hardship allowance” for the man standing watch in the snow is smaller than the fuel allowance of a mid-level official in Delhi. These aren’t oversights. They are instructions. Instructions that say: You are useful. But you are not equal.

But the sharper damage is quieter. It doesn’t show up on a salary slip or a ceremonial file — it’s done inside classrooms where the real spine is softened under polite words like Scholar-Warrior. It starts the moment you pass the SSB — that five-day gauntlet where you’re tested not for blind obedience but for spark: the spark to lead when there’s chaos, to speak when it’s uncomfortable, to stand up when everyone else hesitates. The system chooses you because you showed signs of that raw edge. Then, almost immediately, it teaches you how to bury it.

First on NDA’s quarterdeck — where the body learns to bend till it doesn’t argue back. Then in the IMA’s quiet corridors — where the first salute feels like freedom, but the fine print says: keep it safe, keep it quiet. After that, the real leash: courses, exams, promotion papers sold as “making you a better officer”. But behind the PowerPoint slides and polite doctrine lurks the same trick — repeat what you’re told. Not what you know.

The Directing Staff Solution — the DS answer — is the safest currency in the Army’s training system. Write it, pass. Question it, sink. Young Officers’ Course. Junior Command. Staff College. All fine in theory — until you see that they don’t sharpen your mind to fight better; they train it to fit the next box, next file, next polite nod. They brand you a Scholar-Warrior — as if reading more makes you stronger — when what it really does is remind you daily that true strength is dangerous if spoken too freely.

The same SSB that singled you out for guts quietly trains that out of you with every DS sheet you sign. The risk-taker who jumped across a ditch in the GTO ground learns to tiptoe through ideas that might upset someone above him. The young man who showed courage to challenge during the conference learns to salute a bad answer because it’s the “right” answer on paper. And he learns because he sees what happens to the few who don’t: the Captain marked “not team material”, the Major who spoke too honestly in a syndicate, the Colonel who never sees a staff posting again because he wrote what he actually thought.

This is the quiet tragedy of the Scholar-Warrior. It sounds noble but it kills the real leader the SSB first saw in you. The soldier who knows how to command respect in the dirt learns instead how to seek approval in a file. And when enough bright officers believe that a good paper is worth more than a hard truth, you get a smart Army that writes good doctrine — but forgets how to stand up for its own in broad daylight. That is how you lose the fear the uniform once inspired. Not in a battlefield — but in a training hall where you were told to play safe, stay polite, keep your spark folded away for the day you “really need it”.

Yet cracks appear. They always do. Sometimes a Tiger slips through the DS net. He smiles at the staff instructor, writes the DS answer — then turns around and tells his jawans the real one. Like that CO in Bomdila who stood nose-to-nose with an arrogant SSP, jawans bruised, tempers high, and quietly promised the next hand raised on his men would pay for it in a way no file could save. That Colonel does not wear a General’s rank today. He never will. The system caught him early, filed him away under “difficult”. But he still lives in mess talk, in late night tales over chai, in a fresh Lieutenant’s mind when he wonders: Can I stand if the moment comes?

So where does the fix begin? Not at the top. Senior leadership is not a miracle switch. If a system wants docile officers, the top will reflect that. The real lever is the man who still has a choice — the officer who writes the DS answer but lives the real one. The Captain who tells his men: You will never be left alone in a police lock-up. The Major who tells his company: You will fight, you will bleed if you must, but you will never bow to petty arrogance. The Colonel who holds a line when a local neta or a petty officer tries to push a jawan around to prove who owns fear in that street corner. One man who does it writes a page. Ten men who do it turn that page into a lesson. One generation that does it quietly but firmly turns that lesson into culture again.

Respect for the uniform will never come from a parade ground alone. It comes from the cold understanding that if you push a soldier too far, he will stand so still your threat will die in your mouth. The fix is not a rebellion. It’s a return — to the simple contract that a soldier is not here to be polite first, but to stand for those behind him first. The system wants neat, obedient, controllable managers. The jungle needs leaders who can salute the right flag — and spit out the wrong fear when it tries to tell them to kneel.

Be the leak. Be the Tiger. Not because it looks heroic on a poster, but because one day your jawan will look at your face when it matters — and decide if the stars on your shoulder mean something or nothing. That is the only syllabus that matters. That is the only exam you do not fail.