In the red soil tracts of Rangamati near Chittagong, the young Lieutenant — an intelligence officer for the 2nd Rajput battalion — ducked under boulders, took cover behind the trees and wove through the hills to relay information to his unit. He had been freshly commissioned into the Indian Army and already in a war. Days later he was part of the team that engineered the surrender of the Pakistani army in the Chittagong sector.

Forty years later, when he was Chief of Army Staff, Vijay Kumar Singh revisited Bangladesh in June 2011. The General has been a soldier for as long as Bangladesh has been a country.

How old was Vijay Kumar Singh then? He was just out of the Indian Military Academy and was on his first posting. Maybe he was 21 years old; perhaps he was 22. It didn’t matter then. It matters now.

The Lieutenant has risen to be a General and the army chief. The Congress’s Vayalar Ravi, state mate of defence minister A.K. Antony, goes on television to call him a “frustrated man”.

Ravi believes the General is “frustrated” because he has been unable to get the dispute over his age resolved. Ravi, like Lalu Prasad (Rashtriya Janata Dal) and Shivanand Tiwari (Janata Dal-United), thinks Singh is going out kicking and screaming. He has two months to go before he retires on May 31. Had his year of birth been accepted by the government as 1951, he would have been entitled to a further 10 months in office. But he will retire at the age of 62.

The pity of the entire row between the chief and the government is that this is not about age but about a generation. When V.K. Singh passes on the chief’s baton to his successor, Lieutenant General Bikram Singh, now the Eastern Army Commander headquartered at Fort William, Calcutta, it will mark the passing of a generation. V.K. Singh is the last chief to have been through a full-fledged, three-dimensional war.

As General, Bikram Singh will represent a new generation of soldiers — soldiers who have honed their skills in counter-insurgency, in little wars within the country that have got institutionalised in Jammu and Kashmir and in the Northeast, and threaten to become a permanent feature in the Naxalite zones of eastern and central India, and in missions for the United Nations overseas. In terms of danger, counter-insurgency is probably deadlier. For professional soldiers, the dirty little wars demand a set of skills that are different from the requirement of frontal armed conflict.

When V.K. Singh quits office, the changeover will also symbolise a switch in the nature of armed conflict the world over. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, are being waged inside those countries, not at their borders.

Lieutenant Vijay Kumar Singh was baptised as a soldier of a kind of war that has gone out of fashion — if there is anything fashionable in wars, of course. And General Vijay Kumar Singh is about to bow out as an embattled Chief of Army Staff.

The General has little to show for his soldiery — unlike his predecessor, who found a flat (that he gave up) in posh South Mumbai’s Adarsh high rise. He has a three-bedroom apartment in Gurgaon and a plot allotted to him by the Haryana government (which gives land to army chiefs from the state).

And the irony is that the man who is seen as an honest soldier is serving under A.K. Antony, so widely perceived to be honest that his name was pre-fixed with “Saint” at the time of the 2G controversy. Together they were best placed to do the spring cleaning in the defence establishment that has been tarred with the brush of corruption over the years.

Yet powerful functionaries in the government insinuate that the General is working on behalf of a Calcutta-headquartered company. One functionary alleged he was in a hurry to cut down the share of Tatra trucks with the army — there are 7,000 of them — in favour of Ural India. In effect, there is an effort to smear the General’s reputation with the same spike he used to unearth the Sukna (North Bengal) and Adarsh scams. The Sukna scam involved the illegal transfer of 71 acres of land adjacent to the Sukna military station near Siliguri to a private realtor for constructing an educational institution in 2008. The Adarsh scam related to flats allotted to key officials and politicians in a premier property that was meant for serving and retired defence service personnel.

And that’s not all. It is being insinuated that Singh was a traitor by leaking a letter to the Prime Minister on the state of the armoury. The letter pointed to substandard purchases of army equipment.

His detractors hold that he is lowering the morale of the Indian Army by bickering with the government in public. “If this continues, the Indian Army will be like the Pakistani Army,” says a critic. Others believe that the General, a Rajput, has raised a casteist card. Rajput MPs, they point out, lobbied for Singh during the age controversy, which was finally put to rest by the Supreme Court.

“He is neither a hero nor a villain — I think he is a loose cannon. After the Supreme Court row, I had come on television saying let’s put it all behind us and let the General honourably retire,” former diplomat K.C. Singh said on television.

Far from being a loose cannon, say General Singh’s supporters, he is a marksman, with an unerring eye on the target. In each instance that the General has caused discomfiture for the government, there has been corroboration from the defence minister.

Earlier this week, the General said an attempt was made to bribe him with Rs 14 crore if he bought the trucks that were being recommended by an equipment lobbyist. The allegation is now being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation, and the poor quality and quantity of weaponry with the army are being discussed openly.

Soldiers who have been General Singh’s comrades-in-arms over the decades swear that he is unflappable. When the General gave an interview to The Telegraph this January, too, he played by the book, refusing to make off-the-record remarks in the style of politicians and choosing understatement instead. “Things could have been handled better,” he said — over criticism.

The only instance in which, in recent times, the General has lost his temper is over the leak of his letter to the Prime Minister. He was in Jammu and Kashmir and on a trip to the Vaishno Devi temple after operational briefings in Srinagar when the letter hit the headlines earlier this week. Some thought the General was behind it, but his statement in response began with “This is an outrage!”

The General says there has been a “string of selected leaks” in the past. But he adds that the “institutional integrity” of the army has to be protected, even if it means looking “within”. In a statement on Friday, he said: “We have to identify and within the confines of the system and the law, expose these elements. Freedom of speech and individual opinions need to be respected, but frivolous and uninformed comments on these issues will only muddy the waters.”

The last time the government was faced with a chief that went into its innards was in 1998 when it sacked the then chief of naval staff, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat. Bhagwat is now a staunch supporter of General Singh and insists that the issues he is raising today were the same that he had taken up as the navy chief. George Fernandes was the defence minister that year in the reign of Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Army House, the chief’s official residence in Lutyens’s Delhi’s Rajaji Marg is barely a kilometre from the ministry of defence in South Block. That distance is today lined with an array of invisible trucks when there is practically no truck between the occupants of the two establishments.

It is a gap that may or may not have been borne out of the General’s experience: in 42 years as a soldier in the Indian Army, V.K. Singh had never served in New Delhi. He brought to his job a sensitivity that most of his predecessors were glad to abandon. The mechanism of administration and the powerspeak through which the levers of governance are operated are not part of his lingo.

The battle began with a debate over a date of birth — what’s the truth, and what’s not was the issue. It still is.

Eye of the storm

• Age: Army Chief versus the Union of India: The first service chief to challenge his government in court because his plea for acceptance of 1951 as his year of birth was rejected by defence minister A.K. Antony.

• Scams: As the eastern army commander, V.K. Singh had ordered the Court of Inquiry that unearthed the attempt to transfer military land in the strategic Siliguri corridor in North Bengal. It led to two Lieutenant Generals being court-martialled. Singh’s supporters believe he was victimised for going after corrupt officers.

• Bribe: In an interview to a daily earlier this week, Singh claimed he was offered a bribe of Rs 14 crore by a retired officer and that he had complained to minister Antony. The rows between the army chief and the government have been played out in the backdrop of mega defence contracts that are in the pipeline.

• Leak: After Singh’s letter to the Prime Minister detailing shortages of and shortcomings in the military is leaked, Vayalar Ravi calls him a “frustrated man”. Singh calls the leak an act of “high treason” and an “outrage”.

• Caste: Thirty-five Rajput MPs from across party lines met the Prime Minister last year asking for his year of birth to be accepted as 1951. The Akhil Bhartiya Rajput Sabha has issued public resolutions in his favour. Singh is a Rajput.