Military Power

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Pavan Varma in his book “Being Indian” (Penguin Book 2002):

“Historically Indians have a very mediocre record of defending themselves against foreign invaders”.

“Why do Indians prostrate so abjectly before the rich and the mighty? Why are they so indifferent to the sufferings of the weak and the poor?”

Bharat Verma in his article “Honing the Military Power” in Deccan Herald, Bangalore, 1 February, 07:

“What are the infirmities in our character that have made India remain under foreign rule and domination for almost a thousand years – the longest in known history?”

Before going into the infirmities we must know what our character is. Military character is directly derived from the national character, the character of its people; its civilization; and its social, cultural, religious, moral, economic and philosophical fabric.

These are reflected in history, thoughts, attitudes, behaviour and way of life. They are honed, hammered and shaped into the military character, with specific castings into peculiarities, particularities and distinguishing features necessary to withstand service rigours, and to serve the nation and its people. The honing, hammering and shaping are relevant only in giving a distinctive suitability of strength and endurance necessary to fulfil the tasks and responsibilities. But the main sustaining, motivating source is traits of the people of the nation.

Our awareness of our history, heritage, scriptures, culture, civilization, our strengths and weaknesses, and our intellectual content, have become known to us mainly through foreigners – visitors, travellers, traders, conquerors, rulers and observers who have mostly eulogized what they saw or denigrated as was their proclivity. Indian military is no exception. From Plato to Phillip Mason the Indian soldier’s personal bravery and weapon skills have been extolled, and his sense of izzat praised as a “Matter of Honour”. We lovingly believe it even today and find solace in persuading ourselves that Indians are the best soldiers. And yet foreigners ruled us for a millennium! What of our skills, bravery and izzat? Sixty years after independence we still evaluate our soldiery, our military through the British prism, and follow many of their traditions, systems, rituals and attitudes. Little has been the attempt to discover ourselves by ourselves, assess our own attributes through our own enquiries and experiences of the wars and operations we engaged in since independence, and identify our own indigenous sources of motivation, inspiration and their sustenance. We would also, in the process notice many of our infirmities as well.

Our polity, society and international standing are changing fast. Science and technology are pushing us hard ahead. Security, both internal and external, is adding heavier responsibilities, tensions and commitments to the military. Internal security with its counter-insurgency load has been impinging on the psychological, mental and moral aspects of the soldier. Weapon and missile technologies and nuclear dimensions are calling for greater ingenuity. Terrorism is demanding a fine-tuned multidisciplinary response. Soaring social and financial aspirations are strong contenders in the soldier’s satisfaction scale. Intellectual, academic, analytical cogitation has treated the soldier and the military as either untouchables or holy cows too long.

We have a few universities that run a chair in defence studies. But what use have they or their studies and doctoral thesis been put to by the government or the military or the universities themselves? Lifting of thoughts, theories and researches from outside sources seem to predominate, as much as our low intellectual enquiry and “repetitive study of known phenomena” as opined in the Outlook issue of 23 October, 2000. Hindustan Times issue of 25 June, 2001 called the IDSA, the premier government defence tank, “the Institute of Dodgy Stolen Analysts”. Of the thousands of scientific papers produced by the CSIR in its six decades of existence only three have been cited, against the world average of one in 250, as quoted by Pavan Varma in his book “Being Indian”. The series of articles on our DRDO in the Indian Express in November 2006 opens our eyes to the disastrous, inefficient work the DRDO has put in the research and development of weapon systems, aircraft, ships, tanks, missiles and other connected defence projects. A chat with the users will reveal the DRDO’s and the government’s obsessive patriotic zeal and indulgence towards self-reliance, even when imported components in most systems glare at the observer. Time for and indulgence in such half-baked research and patchwork development need to be put behind.

In this milieu it will be pertinent to find answers to a few questions honestly and sincerely :

• Why does our soldier fight? What makes him fight?
• Why did he give his services to the foreigner, enlist in his army and fight for him, often against the kings, chiefs and leaders of his own region, religion and people?
• How and why did he overcome his own religious and social taboos (such as crossing the sea and interacting with the outsider – Mlechha)?
• Why was the subject of war, fighting and soldiering so much neglected all through India’s history? (Sardar KM Panicker says that no corpus of military theory was developed in India. AL Basham says that war and fighting were treated as matters of glory and sacrifice. The mystical and classificatory industriousness displayed in Arthashastra, Kamasutra, philosophy, logic and mathematics did not extend to the subject of warfare).
• Why did not the Indian mind and the military learn from the repeated onslaught of the foreigner all through history about weaponry, organisations, tactics, strategy and improvisation?
• Why did such a unique system devised by Shivaji in the organisation of security apparatus and waging war (Gamini Gava) remain a flash in the pan?
• What kind of an assessment of our soldier and military system is made in the instances of their unsoldierly and despicable behaviour in the 1962 debacle; the 1965 Khemkaran battle (where a whole brigade dissolved in a matter of a few hours, a unit was captured prisoner by Pakistani’s, and another unit slipped away from its forming up place for attack and remnants gathered at the Beas bridge); the IPKF operations in Sri Lanka (where our soldiers lost a few hundred weapons to the opponent, and a unit in an attack operation slipped away in driblets leaving their commander alone to meet his fatal fate); the counter-insurgency operations in the Northeast and J&K incurring public opprobrium of rape, custodial killing, fake encounters, lifting of citizens on mere suspicion and torturing them; the increasing fratricide and suicide – the list is increasing ..?

These are uncomfortable, tough questions. They blow the bubble of the Indian Army and the soldier being attempted to be shown larger than life, and being the “sole saviour” of the nation as implied in Bharat Verma’s article mentioned at the beginning. Finding answers to these questions requires a thorough study and research in various connected disciplines by various agencies based on historical, psychological, sociological, cultural, financial, moral evidence, trends and interactions with old soldiers, present ones and their leaders, kith and kin. Those who served their foreign masters have left negligible shreds of evidence of their times; and most of them are dead, leaving a minuscule minority who can still throw some light – survivors of the Second World War and the British rule.

But a general Indian mind-trend can be seen all along in the attitude and reaction to the foreign invader establishing his rule in the subcontinent. Indian mind is a cultural amalgam of accepting, obeying and deferring to the superior power-wielder; compromising with opposing force, idea and situation as a means of assuring survival; seeking material benefit at every turn, with faith in God; straining for material gain as well as spiritual practice and yet keeping them separate. The Indian never brought about revolution, seldom rose in revolt, readily jettisoned his weakening powerless boss, transferring his services and loyalty to the next and the more powerful for an advantage, as a compromise. He desired peace, normalcy and orderliness for his pursuit of material well-being and disliked anarchy, disturbance, upheaval, eruption, violence. His rigid, shifting caste system egged him on towards upward social mobility, accumulation of privileges and enhancement of status-izzat-in the social hierarchy. A soldier added to his status in his village, among his community. The British government was a premier promoter of his social as well as financial status, where land grants and civil administration’s (DC’s) help played a seminal role. He appreciated and responded heartily to good leadership, sound administration, beneficent welfare measures and the sympathetic ear of the Sarkar to his sense of izzat that was an offshoot of his idea of status. It was a good piece of imaginative manipulation of controlled narcissism in full flow. It was only when the leadership and administration became callous that there was unrest and revolt in his camp, as happened in 1857, and that too predominantly in the Bengal Army of the day of the Purbias.

So, all in all, a powerful opponent, offering prospects of material benefits, assured status, good leadership and sound administration, far better than the indigenous King, chief or leader could offer, were the obvious reasons for the Indian soldier to serve the foreigner. Whenever the power structure and power play have weakened our independent government the military too has tottered. Counter-insurgency scenario is perhaps the best touchstone of the nation’s top power structure and power play. The numerous, festering insurgencies in the north, northeast and, now, in central India as well have been sustained by the government’s scant regard to democratic processes, its boost to power-building exercises by politicizing almost every problem, and bringing situations to a stage where nothing moves or stops without resorting to violence, use of force, loss of life and property.

In this power game and violent ambience which so frequently call upon the military to contain and curb the conflagration, it is so very strange and typically Indian that its military has so little part in the country’s power structure which plans, executes and oversees national security. Witness the termination of the 1947-48 J&K war where the winning progress of the army was stopped and the problem handed over to the UNO to fester for the next sixty years. Witness the government’s failure to listen to its military’s opinion in 1962 Sino-Indian war. Witness the handing over of areas and strategic heights won at high cost in 1965 back to Pakistan. Witness the return of 93000 Pakistan prisoners in 1971 for virtually no gain. Notice the political scheming in the Punjab in the 1970s and early 80s even as the military leadership was apprehensively discussing in their messes the dangerous fallout of such deadly power game. Note also the northeastern and J &K imbroglio. The story is the same.

The involvement of the military in meeting external threats and dousing internal fires has been so frequent and prolonged that the soldier is being seen as the “sole saviour” of the country (Bharat Verma in his article “Honing the Military power”, Deccan Herald 1 Feb, 07). So does the Pakistani soldier. Then what is the difference? One wields military power, the other defers to the civil power. Indians have a very selfish, power hungry, wealth-building notion of democracy. The government spends thousands of crores on the military – the largest budgetary chunk – but creates little place for its military input in its power structure. In the early 1990s when the then Army Chief said that the military wanted “good governance” the whole lot of politicians, legislators, journalists and intellectuals pounced on him for opening his mouth too wide! The then Defence Minister admonished him. The Chief thereafter locked his mouth. The poor power structure – lopsided – has resulted in avoidable, unnecessary loss of life not only of soldiers but also of our own brethren – insurgents, dissenters – and innocent citizens. Our numerous laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act have resulted in violation of human rights, custodial deaths, torture of suspected civilians and alienation of citizens.

Patting the soldier and extolling military virtue are no longer a fruitful exercise as we cross into the seventh decade of our independence. If we are going to employ the military for decades after decades to solve our security problems, particularly internal ones, then there is something wrong with our nationhood, with our democracy, with our power structure. Our basic instinct to survive by letting problems wallow and become inflexible or resolve themselves somehow out of tiredness or through an unforeseen advantage to one side landed us in a thousand year tutelage. After sixty years of freedom we are handing ourselves over to increasing violence, loss of life, and the acceptance and awe of the power of the system of governance we have chosen and methods we have allowed the government to use. Says the editorial of the Times of India, 21 Mar, 07 “Violence in these regions arises from failure of politics. Governments insensitive to the social and economic needs of the people compound the problem. The vacuum cannot be filled by the security forces. …..Militarisation is not simply the presence of troops but it is also a mindset. It influences people holding office to eschew the difficult task of dialogue and reconciliation to solve political issues in favour of the gun”. There should be “less dependence on security forces to conduct public affairs”.

Time has come when stress should increasingly concentrate on developing and strengthening the ethos and practice of using the military judiciously, selectively and for short durations to control violence. For that to happen it is essential to give a legitimate role, relevance and importance to the military in the power structure. Sacrifices in human lives and limbs made by the military as well as the people should not be drowned in the typical Indian cultural and social ethos of subsuming their loss as destiny, fate, Karma and such philosophical holy pitch. The whole mindset needs to change.

What is the point in highlighting the need for better arms, better wherewithal, better organisation and such other material accruals to the military when the basic theories, philosophy, ethos, power structure and our own awareness of character and weakness, as contained in the questions asked earlier, are not fully explored, researched, assessed and developed as our indigenous corpus?