New Delhi: Lieutenant General Manoj Pande was Monday named the new Chief of the Indian Army. He is the first engineer to be appointed to the position. General MM Naravane will be succeeded by Manoj Pande, who was appointed Vice-Chief of the Army Staff in February 2022. According to reports, a decision on the Chief of Defence Staff’s appointment is still waiting. The last CDS was Bipin Rawat who died in a helicopter crash with his wife in Tamil Nadu, December 8, 2021.
Pande will be the first commander from the Corps of Engineers to be named Army Chief. Usually the position is held by officers from the Infantry, Armoured, and Artillery.
Pande, who was the Eastern Army Commander and one of the leading proponents of more technology integration along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), will bring both operational and logistical experience to the Army chief’s position.
“The Government has decided to appoint Lieutenant General Manoj Pande as the next Chief of Army Staff,” Defence Ministry officials were quoted as saying by news agency ‘ANI’.
An alumnus of the National Defence Academy, Lt Gen Pande was commissioned into the Corps of Engineers in December 1982.
Pande commanded an engineer regiment during ‘Operation Parakram’ in the Pallanwala sector along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir. Incidentally ‘Operation Parakram’, the large-scale mobilisation of troops and weapons on the western border, followed the December 2001 terror attack on Parliament that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.