Should India start worrying about a military threat to its democracy, following the news report of the government discerning a potential military march on Delhi and acting to stop it? Absolutely not.
The report says two units, artillery and paratroopers, moved from their stations towards Delhi, without prior information, on the very same day on which army chief V K Singh had moved the Supreme Court against the government. This caused some concern in the government, which spotted the movement, and took steps to first stymie and then reverse it.
In its later assessment, the government concluded that there had been nothing sinister about these troop movements and that the official explanation, of routine exercise, was perfectly legitimate. That the troops keep up their training is good news.
That the government has systems in place to monitor even unreported troop movements and to slow them down is reassuring: not so much because it averts a possible military coup as because it signals an institutional capacity that is rare in this country.
That Delhi already had in place huge contingents of armed forces at that time, ready for the Republic Day parade, meant that two additional units were either redundant or insufficient to cause mischief. That prior information was missing could be either because the units moving were too small or because of the sloppiness that pervades the government.
What the episode shows is a certain frazzling of nerves at the top of the administration, in the wake of an unseemly exchange of unpleasantries between the army chief and the government.
The controversy over the general's age stemmed from faulty processes within the army, which maintained two sets of records without reconciling them, crafty exploitation of the discrepancy by the army brass to devise a particular line of succession and civilian failure to check these games in time.
These spell no systemic fault in the integrity of total civilian supremacy over the armed forces in India. India's democracy is fully secure.
The overall fallout of the story is to lower both the army chief and the defence minister in public esteem, as those who bumble into a messy civil-military standoff.