Army and the Indian nation: past, present and future

Hindustan Times

15-05-2025

The armed forces have always had a lot of prestige and reverence in India. These emotions have been on full display in the aftermath of the recent military conflict with Pakistan. Ironical as it may sound, adulation towards the military is not the default emotion in large parts of the world, especially the decolonised world, where the army has often been seen as a threat to democracy and civil liberties. Pakistan is one of the biggest examples of what the army's toxic influence can do to a country. What makes India an exception on this count?
India's recent public discourse, in fact, has veered further in the opposite direction from large parts of the decolonised world. The current regime, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has often politically celebrated its policy of giving more 'operational freedom' to the army than was available under the previous regimes. Does civilian control over the army; while it protects democratic freedom, tend to constrain a country's armed forces from performing to their full potential? Has it been the case in India in the past?
Is a politics, which commits itself to giving more freedom to the army also the best policy to safeguard and advance strategic interests of a country? Can this question be answered vis-a-via India in today's day and age?
The answers to these three questions, both in general terms and in the specific context of India, have attracted the minds of generations of experts on history, military and strategic studies. Some of the best work on the Indian aspect of these questions has actually been published in the recent past. This week's column revisits some of the important scholarly arguments on these questions, which can hopefully, make the ongoing debate and discussion better informed.
How India managed to keep the army in the barracks unlike Pakistan
The British Indian army was one of the largest armed forces raised under colonial rule. It was primarily a tool of serving imperial interests, not just in imperial wars but also subjugating the domestic citizenry if needed. Our founding fathers had deeply thought about these issues even before independence. They hit the ground running as far as keeping the military's oppressive and interventionist instincts in check was concerned as soon as we got freedom.
These efforts took the shape of both deeply thought-out policy measures as well as playing on optics in resetting the civil-military balance in independent India. A 2010 article in the Seminar magazine by historian Srinath Raghavan, for example, noted how Jawaharlal Nehru shot down independent India's first (British) commander-in-chief General Rob Lockhart's orders that the public be kept away from the flag hoisting ceremony on the first independence day, sending a message that the army was to be subservient to democratic control in independent India.
Political scientist Steven Wilkinson's 2015 book Army and the Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence noted that Nehru deliberately chose the Commander-in-Chief's official residence Teen Murti Bhawan as the Prime Minister's residence after independence.
What is even more interesting in Wilkinson's book were three factors which he identifies as having led to key difference between the civilian-military relations in newly independent India and Pakistan, which led to the military acquiring far more power and ending up dominating the civilian arm in the latter. They are: Pakistan being delivered a 'worse hand' in terms of resources; both military and civilian, during partition, the Congress's institutional structures being better than the Muslim League's, which made the former better equipped to handle political contradictions and therefore lend more credibility to democracy, and the Indian government taking conscious 'coup-proofing' steps to safeguard civilian supremacy. A detailed explanation of the arguments will take too much space, so the column will cherry-pick from Wilkinson's book to give a broad idea about them.
While the Muslim League managed to get the democratic ballast for creating a new Muslim state by winning big in Muslim-reserved constituencies in the 1946 elections, the new nation-state was bound to suffer from important structural handicaps. Among them were of Pakistan inheriting a small part of the revenue generated in India but a large part of the actual conflict-ridden border with Afghanistan, which had consumed a lot of the defence spending in British India, thereby leading to a bigger burden of military expenditure.
The asymmetry was not confined to resources alone. The British Indian army had disproportionate representation from both Indian and Pakistani Punjab –owing to the imperial policy of recruiting from martial races – but almost none from Bengal. East Pakistan, which eventually became Bangladesh, would have a majority of Pakistan's population but almost no representation in its armed forces, creating a fundamental asymmetry in the army's composition. Whether Pakistani army's atrocities during the Bangladeshi liberation war would have been the same had Bengalis been well-represented in the army is an important counterfactual.
The Congress party, which unlike the Muslim League was an organic political beast well aware of the contradictions within the Indian society. Unlike the League, which was consumed by almost a hubris that creating an Islamic state was a silver bullet to take care of all other contradictions, the Congress knew better about the democratic challenge these posed. That Pakistan was imposing Urdu on its majority Bengali speaking population — a major reason for alienation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan — while India was carving out states on linguistic basis gives an insight into the political sense of these two parties.
Muslim League's lack of political prowess in handling Pakistan's internal contradictions unlike the Congress in India — often the top leadership of the Congress changed its mind on issues after democratic pressure — weakened democracy in Pakistan and tilted the scales in military's favour.
India's early political leadership did not leave everything to chance to preserve civilian supremacy over the military and took explicit measures to what Wilkinson calls 'coup-proof' India. They included things such as abolishing the Commander-in-Chief's post, empowering the civilian bureaucracy vis-à-vis the military, taking conscious efforts to make the military's leadership more representative in ethnic terms and keeping the army on a strict leash by intelligence gathering on its leadership, shortening tenures and even tactically pushing retired officers out of the country on diplomatic postings when they were seen as meddling in domestic politics.
The Indian state also raised a large para-military force, which is now almost comparable to the strength of the army, to tackle internal security responsibilities which might have made the army a bigger player in internal political and ethnic tensions risking its politicisation in the process.
Did the civilian leash constrain the army in India?
While a lot of the credit for preserving India's nascent democracy from the military's intervention is due to Jawaharlal Nehru, his legacy suffered the biggest damage when India's faced a humiliating defeat at the hands of China in the 1962 war. The China debacle generated a widespread opinion that the civilian leadership had jeopardised national security in its zeal to keep the military on a leash thereby crippling its fighting capabilities. To be sure, the idea has been contested by historians such as Raghavan who has argued that claims of civilian interference behind the China debacle were 'at best radically incomplete and at worst downright false'.
Facts notwithstanding, the hangover of the 1962 military debacle led to a sub-optimal arrangement in the civilian-military relations. The government let the army decide its course on operational issues without any civilian oversight without ceding control on larger policies and resource allocation. This did not necessarily lead to better outcomes. To be sure, on other important occasions, such as what Raghavan terms as India's delayed intervention in the 1971 war in his book on the creation of Bangladesh, both the civilian leadership and the army took the wrong line of delay despite counsel to the contrary.
Raghavan's views on civilian-military relations, of course, are firmly tilted in the favour of the former being in command. 'Civilian involvement (including those at the tactical levels in army matters) is essential, even if it may not always have a salutary effect. This is particularly so in a democratic system', he wrote in his Seminar essay quoted above.
Other scholars, such as Anit Mukherjee have argued that the real collateral damage in the uneasy truce – what he calls 'the absent dialogue' between politicians, the military and bureaucrats in India in a 2020 book by the same name – is the efficacy of the army in performing its stated goals. These issues have manifested themselves in things such as lack of coordination and resource optimisation between different military wings (army, air force and the navy) and procurement needs being delayed inordinately for the military. This silo-based approach has also created the problem of the lack of adequate domain knowledge about military affairs in the civilian arm of the government, which, in fact, jeopardises the very idea of effective civilian control of the military.
To be sure, Mukherjee's book is primarily focused on the pre-2014 period when India did not have a post of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), often seen as a necessary reform to undo the unity-of-purpose damage done by abolition of the Commander-in-Chief's post in the armed forces. Civilian-military relations hit a nadir in the run up to 2014 with a serving army chief accusing the government of falsifying his age to shorten his tenure, there was an unexplained movement of army troops towards the national capital in what was described as an alleged coup-attempt and even army veterans came out openly against the government of the day on issues such as One Rank One Pension.
These controversies were preceded by things such as the growing chorus for defence reforms in the aftermath of the Kargil war and the civilian-military discord on things such as demilitarisation of the Siachen Glacier and the propriety and maintainability of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in areas where the army was involved in counter-insurgency operations.
While some of the issues flagged in Mukherjee's book have been addressed under the current government, most importantly the creation of a CDS, the armed forces and their ability to live up to their own stated national security doctrine is far from being realized at the current moment.
Operational freedom can do very little do take care of structural constrains for the military
While the entire country is celebrating the efficacy of India's air-defence systems (very expensive weaponry) in the aftermath of the recent conflict with Pakistan, the political narrative vis-à-vis the armed forces was very different in the 2024 general election. The opposition made the Agniveer scheme – which plans to hires soldiers for only four years instead of the much longer hirings with retirement pensions earlier – a major electoral issue hoping to attract the votes of unemployed youth who were hoping to land a job in the armed forces.
While most rational observers take narratives of future wars becoming more and more mechanised and even digitised to the extent of making conventional combat irrelevant with more than a pinch of salt, there is little doubt that the military will become more and more capital intensive gradually, making it more expensive but less employment generating.
In a country like India where jobs are scarce and fiscal resources already stretched thin towards balancing the necessary (such as national security) with the political prudent (welfare), the rising capital intensity of the military is bound to become an increasingly difficult to handle contradiction. In conservative institutions such as the army, these are anything but easy contradictions ton handle.
In a 2023 compendium published by the Observer Research foundation, for example, former army chief Manoj Naravane talks about the army being saddled with ten thousand mules and as many handlers despite animal transport battalions becoming redundant with the availability of all-terrain vehicles.
Employment is not the only concern vis-à-vis India's future military preparedness. Procurements, caught between red-tape, resource constraint and the ambitions of import substitution continue to put a squeeze on the military's operational prowess, especially the air force and the navy.
Senior military functionaries, serving or retired, have flagged these concerns, especially in the context of the rising military might of China. The latter is significantly ahead of India not just in terms of economic resources but also indigenous capabilities of its military industrial complex. In fact, while conflicts with Pakistan continue to animate a large part of the country and popular opinion, India's real strategic challenge emanates from its eastern not western neighbour, which has been supporting the former to keep the spectre or a two-front war alive for India.
India's military prowess, or the lack of it, is not something, which exists in vacuum. It is deeply linked with other aspects of what the Indian state choses to do. For example, India's growing proximity to the US which is now described as a strategic alliance – an idea being increasingly questioned in the wake of President Donald Trump's recent public statements hyphenating India-Pakistan – has often been peddled as an excuse to severe its defence relations with Russia.
This chorus became louder in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. Russian air defense systems played a major role in the recent conflict. While Russia is more willing to offer its best military equipment and also more likely to share technological know how and interoperability with other systems; imported or locally developed, at cheaper prices, it simply cannot be a substitute for the US in a lot of commercial transactions and cutting-edge technologies which are equally important for the Indian state.
Similarly, despite being supportive of the Palestinian cause (at least on a de jure basis) India has cultivated a deep strategic relation with Israel and procures a lot of defence hardware from it, making it an important cog in the wheel of India's military preparedness.
These contradictions make India' pursuit of its strategic goals a difficult balancing act where future decisions are always at the risk of falling between the proverbial stools of being oblivious of the past or sidetracked by it. While it is to be expected that the political regime of the day will always portray itself as handling these strategic contradictions better than its opposition even as the latter tries to pit one against the another for political gains, a democracy must always guard against policy becoming a victim of its own propaganda rhetoric. The last thing which can help this cause is a shrill and uninformed public discourse which is often encouraged by competing stakeholders in the democratic realm.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa.