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Recent attention has returned to the events surrounding the Rechin La episode of August 2020, particularly the claim that India’s political leadership sought to shift responsibility for that episode onto the then Chief of Army Staff, Manoj Mukund Naravane. The criticism is familiar: civilian leaders mishandled a military crisis and later sought cover behind the uniform.

That criticism is not misplaced. It is also incomplete.

What the political leadership did was wrong. This is no way to manage a professional army, either during a crisis or afterwards. Much has already been written on this aspect, and repeating it adds little. What remains insufficiently examined are the deeper institutional failures that made such buck-passing possible in the first place.

To understand those failures, one must look not at personalities but at time, terrain, and doctrine.

When the Rechin La incident occurred on the night of 31 August 2020, it did not take place in a strategic vacuum. More than two and a half months earlier, on 15 June 2020, B. Santosh Babu and 19 soldiers of 16 Bihar were killed in the Galwan Valley in a violent confrontation with Chinese troops.

Galwan was not an aberration. It was a declaration of intent.

By mid-June 2020, Chinese behaviour in eastern Ladakh had crossed from coercive signalling into open physical confrontation. The willingness to escalate was clear. From that........

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