Military & Aerospace

Chief of Defence Staff and Military Integration
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Issue Net Edition | Date : 03 Mar , 2020

On New Year’s Day 2020, the Government appointment Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) as announced by the Prime Minister on the Independence Day of 2019 from the ramparts of Red Fort. As India’s first CDS, General Bipin Rawat, will perform multiple and overlapping functions. He will act as the principal military advisor to the defence minister however; the service chiefs will continue to advise the minister on their respective services.

The CDS is envisaged as the first among equals. To enable the CDS perform this function, the Government has also created a Department of Military Affairs (DMA) within the Ministry of Defence that will deal with issues relating expressly to matters military—including jointness, integration, prioritizing for budgets—leaving wider defence policy—including capital acquisition—to other parts of the ministry. The CDS will also hold the post of permanent Chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee as recommended by Naresh Chandra Committee in 2011 in which capacity he will oversee tri-service organizations and be part of the chain of nuclear command.

These moves have been hailed as major reforms—possibly the “most significant development in the national security domain since independence.” The idea of a CDS has been mooted for decades, including reports of the Subrahmanyam Task Force in 2000 after the Kargil battle followed by Group of Ministers under Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani in 2001 and high-powered Naresh Chandra Committee in 2011. The Government has not only established this office, but has ushered in related changes. The DMA does away with the peculiar arrangement whereby the service headquarters were kept at arm’s length from the Government as “attached offices” of the ministry.

The military had long maintained that this arrangement enabled bureaucratic dominance of—not to say monopoly over—defence policymaking. The CDS will accord the military a prominent seat at Cabinet Committee on Security the decision-making body. Similarly, the CDS appears well positioned to deliver on longstanding, if also contentious, goals of integration—including the creation of integrated theatre commands, which is likely to take another two to three years to achieve a win-win situation and minimum casualties during future warfare.

As we ponder the tasks and challenges that lie ahead in defence and national security, it may be useful to take a longer historical view of the evolution of civil-military relations in India. The institutional pattern and its infirmities that we now look to transcend were not cast in stone at the time of Independence. Rather, they evolved over a period of time. Further, even its more problematic aspects—such as the desire to limit the military’s role in policy-making structures—evolved against broader concerns about its implications for democratic politics and not merely owing to unfounded fears of a military coup.

Military in the British Empire

It is worth analysing as to how the British Empire misused loyal and strong Indian Army. TheBritish bequeathed the tradition of political control over the military to independent India. On the contrary, the British Empire in India was in its origins a military autocracy and the military remained prominent in the British Raj throughout its existence. Even in peacetime about 40 per cent of the central government’s revenue was spent on the army in India. In 1900–01, for instance, the government spent nearly three times more on the army than it did on irrigation, famine relief and education.

This was not merely because of the deployment of the Indian army for imperial wars or the payment of “home charges” as held by theorists of the “drain of wealth” from India. Rather it was because of the institutional heft of the military and the consequent ability of the Commander-in-Chief of India to lay claim to a large chunk of the government’s budget on grounds of military necessity. Following the spat between Viceroy Lord Curzon and Commander-in-Chief General Kitchener, which led to Curzon’s resignation in 1905, the institutional balance of power tilted further in favour of the Commander-in-Chief. The latter was not only the commander of all military forces in India, but also became the Military Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. In effect, the Commander-in-Chief was also the defence minister of the government—hardly a model of political control of the military.

The emerging Indian nationalists were quick to grasp these issues. In his speech on the budget of 1903, Gopal Krishna Gokhale argued, “Indian finance is virtually at the mercy of military considerations”. Military security, he conceded, was undoubtedly a “paramount consideration”, but military preparedness had “no definite standard and might absorb whatever resources can be made available for it practically without limit”. The military’s own assessment of its requirements was being accorded excessive weight in the government’s consideration of the matter.

These issues came to the fore after the First World War. The “Army in India Committee”, led by Lord Esher, asserted the importance of imperial duties, rejected increased democratic control over the military, and proposed buttressing the Commander-in-Chief’s position. These recommendations drew sharp criticism in the newly constituted legislative assembly. Indian members of the house tabled 15 resolutions as recommendations to the Viceroy, which covered the central structural problem of civil–military relations.

The absence of “a fully responsible government in India”, they argued, did not warrant a different form of civil–military relations from Britain. To realize the “principle of ultimate supremacy of the civil power”, it was imperative that the Commander-in-Chief ceased to be a member of the Executive Council. Instead, the portfolio of defence should be entrusted to a civilian member. The Commander-in-Chief should not be allowed to commit the Indian government to “any pecuniary responsibility or any line of military policy that has not already been the subject of decision by them”.

Indeed in its final years, during and after the Second World War, the British Raj returned to its origins as a military autocracy with the promulgation of Defence of India rules and the appointment of military officers as governors general. It was only when the interim government was formed in September 1946 that a civilian, Sardar Baldev Singh, was appointed the military member of the Executive Council. At the time of Independence, the chiefs of air force and navy were designated Commander-in-Chief, thereby reducing the primacy accorded to the army. Still later, in 1955, the title of Commander-in-Chief was abolished altogether and the heads of the defence services were designated chiefs of staff.

Now in 2020 the appointment of CDS is based on threat perception and need based however, a large number of issues need to be ironed out by reducing the influence of bureaucracy in the Ministry of Defence as bureaucrats need to undergo Army courses conducted at Defence Services Staff College, Higher Command and National Defence College before their induction in the MoD.

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The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Indian Defence Review.

About the Author

Col (Dr) PK Vasudeva

is author of World Trade Organisation: Implications for Indian Economy, Pearson Education and also a former Professor International Trade.

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