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Chandigarh: One of the enduring curiosities of Indian officialdom is how readily senior officials have ready answers to problems and issues that defied resolution while they were still in office.

In innumerable television debates and newspaper columns, and even in regular conversations, these grandees display an uncanny knack for forthrightly stating how matters they grappled with for years could have easily been resolved.

In miraculous Eureka moments, retired civil servants acquire an almost uncanny certainty about how their departments and ministries should be run, former diplomats discover with equal clarity how foreign policy ought to be conducted, while others emerge with fully formed answers to tricky matters that have eluded the Indian establishment for decades.

Senior Indian military officers too are no different.

Retirement confers a freedom of candour that the uniform restricted

Once out of uniform, many of them expound freely about how timely force modernisation, better procurement and stronger operational preparedness could well have transformed their particular service. Retirement, it seems, confers a freedom of candour that the uniform restricted.

And, in numerous such instances, many of their observations are valid, but inevitably raise the highly discomfiting question: what did they do about these serious and obvious anomalies when they were still in positions of authority to influence matters?

Air Marshal Nagesh Kapoor, who retired as the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) Vice Chief of Air Staff (VCOAS) in June, offers a particularly striking example.

When asked in an August 22 interview with NDTV, whether it made rational military sense for the IAF to potentially field the 4.5-generation, under-development indigenous Tejas Mk-2 fighter 2035 onwards against China, which was moving towards 6th-generation combat capability, or Pakistan, which was imminently inducting 5th-generation platforms, AM Kapoor categorically declared: “No, operationally, definitely No.”

China already operates a large fleet of 5th-generation J-20 stealth fighters, is moving ahead with the comparable J-35 and is still developing more advanced 6th-generation models like the ‘Chengdu’ J-36 and ‘Shenyang’ J-50. Pakistan, on the other hand, is reportedly due to begin receiving the J-35AE (Export) variant later this year. Kapoor’s concern, and indeed that of the IAF, is therefore not some futuristic fantasy about highly advanced enemy fighters, but the very real possibility that India’s supposedly 4.5-generation Tejas Mk 2 could well be chasing a dated capability that its principal adversaries have already moved beyond.

It is difficult to question the logic of Kapoor’s response, a view widely shared by a large cross-section of serving and retired IAF fighter pilots and military planners. But what is striking is that the former VCOAS voiced this self-evident evaluation only upon retirement, having been the IAF’s second-highest-ranking officer until June 2026 and responsible for the Force’s operational planning, modernisation, procurement and overall capability development. The three-star officer didn’t confirm or deny whether he had actually raised this fighter mismatch with the government or not.

Moreover, even if the........

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