Lt Gen N S Raja Subramani (retd) has been appointed as India’s next Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) and Secretary, Department of Military Affairs (DMA), and he will assume office on May 31. He will be India’s third CDS after the late Gen Bipin Rawat and Gen Anil Chauhan, who assumed office in September 2022 and whose three-year term was extended until the end of May.

The post of the CDS was created during Modi 2.0 in December 2019, and the then army chief, General Rawat, was appointed as the first incumbent in January 2020, after he had completed his tenure as chief. Tragically, Gen Rawat died in a helicopter crash in December 2021, and many of the structural changes that had been envisioned (nurturing jointness, creating theatre commands, and scaling up self-reliance in military inventory) remained incomplete. Even in 2026, they are yet to be implemented. For reasons that remain inexplicable, the government did not appoint a CDS for almost a year, and it was only at the end of September 2022 that the second CDS was appointed.

The choice was a surprise, in that the Modi government decided to appoint a retired three-star officer, then Lt General Anil Chauhan, and promote him to four-star.

This was unprecedented, and while the government created the legal basis in June 2022 by amending the service rules to allow serving or retired Lt Generals (and equivalents) below the age of 62 to be appointed as CDS, it created an anomalous disruption in India’s........

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