Clouds Over Chetwode’s Credo : Indian Army’s Apolitical and Secular Character under Threat

Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode’s inaugural speech delivered on 10 December 1932 at the Indian Military Academy (IMA) Dehradun set the tone and tenor of military professionalism in India. The Field Marshal’s speech contained two pieces of advice for the Gentlemen Cadets. 

The first piece of advice urged the young cadets to remember that “An Army can have no politics. It is the paid servant of the people and is at the disposal of the Government of the day, whatever may be the political complexion of that Government.” 

His second advice outlined the three guiding principles that place the honour of the country above every other concern of a military officer. 

In early 1930s, Chetwode’s insistence on keeping the army politics-free was to dissuade nationalist youth from joining the newly Indianized army and challenging the validity of the empire. The Indian state that was neither based on ideology or theology opted for its army to remain moored to an apolitical and secular ethos and thus Chetwode continued to be relevant post-independence. 

Today, the Chetwode’s code of military professionalism is flagrantly violated. The Indian military is no longer blasé about politics. Politics is no longer a taboo in army messes and naval wardrooms because it is openly discussed by serving officers on social media. 

The social-media posts by many serving officers largely echo the aggressive-nationalist sentiments expressed by the right-wing politicians. Only on rare occasions one gets to hear a contrarian view from a serving officer. 

Forget left-wing views, the officers who believe in Field Marshal Chetwode’s credo are also reticent. They feel constrained to bring a modicum of balance in the discourse. 

Some social media comments make one wonder if the Supreme Commander of the armed forces is the Prime Minister and not the President. The fact is that boundaries that distinguish military personnel from civilians in context of their political participation are getting eroded. 

Looking at social media trends and the brazen manner in which rabid right-wing propaganda is posted and forwarded by serving military officers, it is not far-fetched to imagine that the top military leadership in the country is fully aware of it. From time to time the military establishment has been issuing directions for armed forces personnel to refrain from commenting on social media. However, the fact that instructions are going unheeded clearly shows that there is lack of will on part of the service headquarters to impose discipline. 

Take for example the Navy Foundation, a body of former naval officers. The Delhi chapter of the foundation is regularly involved in spreading communal agenda. The Hindu reported about the 20 October 2015 newsletter of the Navy Foundation that featured an article with negative references to the minority community.[1] 

A few retired senior naval officers also informed the naval headquarters about this. In December last year the Naval Chief reiterated that “Every ship of the Indian Navy is a microcosm of India, where we have personnel from every single state, including every religion as well.” 

The Indian Navy  neither indulges in invoking any religious text before casting off or launching its missiles, nor does it employ and religious gurus to help its sailors in need. In fact, the Indian Navy, prohibits the display of images of Gods or religious symbols in sailors’ mess decks or any other part of the ship. 

One cannot deny the retired community their right to politics, but can the Naval Foundation that is directly linked to the Naval Headquarters web-portal be allowed to post communal and political propaganda material. Such partisan trends are indicative of the deep malaise that has gradually crept into the armed forces over the past few years. 

There is a distinction between serving a constitutionally elected government (the BJP) and serving the ideology (the RSS) that the government believes in. The Right-Wing nationalist discourse that conflates religion with the state has set in motion a chain of confusion. where honoring the cow is seen as equivalent to serving the country. Armed forces are an important ingredient in the right-wing recipe of aggressive nationalism. In order to appease its ideological master, the ruling dispensation at the center wants the armed forces barricaded within the sacred walls of Hindutva. Just as the Turkish army is considered to be the “home of the Prophet,” the RSS perhaps prefers to confine the Indian army to a home of some Hindu God. 

The use of armed forces by the right-wing for political purposes is a menace. The martyrs in J &K were brazenly politicized in the recent controversy in which nationalism of India’s premier university was questioned by some media houses using doctored videos. Last week, a Hindi news channel, IBN 7 interviewed Havildar Sudhir Kumar Yadav in uniform, where he spoke against the against JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, taking absolutely similar position as propagated by the RSS.[2]

Such blatant use of a serving army man in political fight is unprecedented. The forces behind this sinister propaganda are unaware of the dangerous consequences of mixing armed forces and politics. In all probability the video could be doctored, because after a few hours of its broadcast it was removed from the website of the channel, however, IBN7 did carry a story on their website that mentioned about the interview. However, if the interviewee is service personnel then it has to be seen what action army headquarter takes against him for such indiscipline. 

Ajai Shukla, India’s foremost defence journalist in his article titled “Armyism” published in Business Standard, gives us more examples where the government has involved the armed forces in religious functions like Yoga Day.[3] 

The government is scaling up the military to a pedestal where questioning or criticizing the military becomes sacrilegious and paradoxically it is engaged in ridiculing its just demands for OROP and other allowances in the seventh pay commission. Adding insult to injury, the government approved deployment of army personnel and equipment for building pontoon bridges for a private function of Sri Sri Ravishankar, a religious guru. As if this was not enough, the government acted in a ham-handed manner and arrested a 75-year old veteran, an office bearer of the ex-servicemen organization struggling for just and legitimate pension rights. 

The rightward politicization of the military is disturbing the civil-military equilibrium and militates against the tenets of a democratic state. The dangers inherent in these trends need to be debated by social scientists as well as military studies experts. These developments have the power to boost the army’s propensity to acquire political power or as Field Marshal Chetwode warned in his 1932 speech, “Once there is any suspicion that an Army, or any part of it is biased politically, from that moment the Army has lost the hill confidence of the nation who pays for it. It is no longer impartial, and that way lies chaos and civil war.” 

---

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/controversial-remarks-in-navy-foundation-newsletter/article7798041.ece

[2] http://khabar.ibnlive.com/news/desh/kanhaiya-kumar-army-sudhir-kumar-yadav-jnu-kashmir-rape-460405.html

[3] http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/ajai-shukla-armyism-116031401233_1.html

The Fog and Friction of Civil-Military War in India

 The way things stand today, India cannot afford to postpone thinking about the civil-military relations. Much more than frivolous issues like FDI in retail,  financial reforms or strategic tie up to be a great power, it is the civil-military conundrum that should occupy the strategic debate in the country. Any neglect of the concerns that the armed forces are raising will only accentuate the feeling of alienation that many sections of the national militray are harbouring.  There is an urgent need of adroit management of the inevitable militarization of the polity and politicization of the military rather than being passive bystanders at the cusp of changing times

Pandit Nehru's funeral and large army presence to control crowds and to avoid the chaos that happened at Mahatma Gandhi's funeral  

In 1964, at Nehru’s funeral, Indian army troops had quietly moved into Delhi, raising fears that the army was planning to take over the reins of power. The civilian authorities were not convinced that the sudden surge of troops into the capital was to control crowds at the funeral. They went to the extent of tapping the phone of Gen JN Chaudhuri, then Army Chief. Incidentally,  the memories of 62 war defeat were fresh at this time and  the American influence on our military that had begun during the mid 1940s became more pronounced. However, after Nehru's death India refused to join up with the Americans without rocking the civil-military boat any further. 

Five decades later, the Indian media has once again reported a similar story - on the night of 16 January (the day on which the army chief Gen VK Singh decided to go to court against the government to resolve his age issue), an unusual converging of the Indian army units (mechanised infantry and 50 Parachute Brigade) took place around the national capital that already has two brigades stationed in Delhi cantonment. According to the Indian army all this was a part of a routine exercise to make the soldiers march through the formidable Delhi fog.

Much like in 1964, the alleged coup of 2012 also happened only in the minds of certain people. However, this sudden flux, the search for a new equilibrium in the civil-military relations in India is certainly not a figment of a reporter’s imagination. The Indian armed forces community is no longer at its submissive best. It is feeling marginalized as the civilian administration is cussedly clinging on to archaic definitions of politico-military equations and making the military feel almost like a civil society group. For years the government and the military were one - equally Indian – then why has the military suddenly started appearing as a separate entity distanced from the state?

The tumultuous trend started in 2008, during the 6th Pay Commission deliberations when ex-servicemen movements sprang up. Aping American veterans, the Indian retired community returned their medals to the President of India, and even sent a memorandum to the Prime Minister signed in blood. The issue was given a burial with a generous pay package by the government. However, these questions have resurfaced after the current Indian chief of army staff decided to drag the government to the apex court to settle his date of birth.

The General belongs to the generation that grew up with a sense of defeat and humiliation at the hands of China. His generation had come to revere Field Marshal Sam Mankeshaw who had not only won India a military victory in Bangladesh but had also dared to address Indira Gandhi as ‘Sweetie’ – an ultimate achievement for a generation of military officers brought up to play second fiddle to the politicians.

After Sam Mankeshaw the Indian armed forces have failed to produce a General, who could be a match for the guts of the two Field Marshals, KM Cariappa and Sam Manekshaw or General KS Thimayya when it came to dealing firmly with politicians. The closest a general came to occupy the vacant spot was General K Sundarji, however, he failed to seal his place because of the Indian military’s failure in Sri Lanka in late 1980s. The others who followed were generally considered to be nine-to-five variety of generals who were more bothered about their post retirement jobs in the government than in making any serious attempts to halt the downward slide of the armed forces in the national protocol list. Perhaps it is this vacuum that General VK Singh has attempted to fill through his strident stand against the government.

Towards the fag end of the 1990s Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat brought to fore the misdemeanors of the political class in hobnobbing with illegal and legal arms dealers. He had defied the then defence minister, George Fernandes and gave orders to his men not to pay undue respect to bureaucrats in the MoD like addressing them as ‘sir’ nor to offer any rum bottles (from officer’s personal quota) to clerks in the ministry to get files cleared on a fast track.

But unfortunately, very few in the defence community could appreciate what the Admiral was doing. The Admiral was ahead of the times. His campaign against the foreign military industrial complex was launched at a time when majority of the Indian elite were intoxicated by the neo-liberal reforms and the ensuing strategic relationship with the United States and Israel. The Admiral’s liberal secular views also did not cut much ice with the then BJP government. The result was that Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat was sacked without causing much reshuffle on the civil-military front.

Today, the same veterans who had once opposed Admiral Bhagwat are now standing up to support General VK Singh in his tirade against only one particular arms deal. Their political compulsions of embarrassing the government are understandable but their ideological commitment to the idea of a corruption free arms trade is suspect. There is every possibility that much of this support is only to see the defence minister replaced by a more pliable man favoring the arms lobby. While there is clarity about what Admiral Bhagwat stood for, one is not clear about the intellectual depth in General VK Singh’s stand on India’s defence preparedness and civil-military linkages.

It is naively believed by some that the protracted civil-military tussle can be sorted out simply with the increased presence of men in uniform at key decision making positions in the ministry of defence. It is suggested that bureaucracy be removed as a via media between the government and the military. At a theoretical level, accepting a modicum of militarization of the polity is a sound suggestion but in practice the removal of bureaucracy will bring the military in direct touch with politicians. The military would then be expected to not only manage organized violence but also cash flows associated with arms deals on behalf of politicians. This may lead military officers to seek bank accounts in tax havens – subjecting the men-in-uniform to political and criminal pressures. In nutshell, militarization of the polity will concomitantly lead to greater corruption but also politicization of the military.

The conservative politicians may accept the enhanced role for military within political structures. But can military afford to tamper with its apolitical character? The regular interactions of the Indian army with civilian populations in counter insurgency operations has already made the army’s command structure vulnerable to corrupt practices and allegations of human rights violations, any further penetration into civilian realms is likely to have deleterious impact on our democracy.

If a minimalist politicization of the army to restore the civil-military equilibrium appears unhealthy, then equally dangerous is the proposition of leaving the army wrapped in a Nehruvian jacket - dangling away from mainstream national decision making bodies. It is scary because times have changed and so has the Indian foreign policy that is tilting towards the USA. The Indian military is being urged to rethink its mission and feel emboldened to play a more proactive role on the international stage. As expected, the Indian military’s direct contact with the American empire is aggravating the civil military complexities. Under such circumstances if the political class was to fail to bridge the gap between the Indian state and its armed forces, the men-in-uniform may be tempted to seek solace in American arms as many militaries from third world countries have done earlier. As Morris Janowitz had identified in his book, The Professional Soldier: a Social and Political Portrait (1960) - "The transformation of the military to one which ‘seeks viable international relations, rather than victory…leads to an inevitable politicization of the military. And with this comes an implicit challenge to civilian supremacy."

Gen VK Singh’s melodramatic media strategy must not be allowed to go in vain. It should lead the authorities to put on their thinking caps. The biggest challenge for Indian leadership is to curtail the imperial army from courting our military. There is an urgent need of adroit management of the inevitable militarization of the polity and politicization of the military rather than being passive bystanders at the cusp of changing times.