Book Review: Steven Wilkinson,Army and Nation

For many years, Stephen Cohen’s work, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation, set the standard and bar for our understanding of the Indian Army from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century. Chapter 7 of this book, ‘The Indian Army after Independence’, touched upon the post-1947 debates, but there has been a gap in research since. Steven Wilkinson’s Army and Nation expands on Cohen’s seminal chapter and fills the gap in our knowledge and understanding of the Indian Army from 1947 to the twenty-first century. Wilkinson has built upon the excellent foundations laid out by Stephen Cohen, and Army and Nation sets a new benchmark as the most thoroughly researched and definitive focusing on the Indian Army and its relations with the Indian government in the post-1947 era. This is not just an important and timely book for historians, political scientists and South Asian specialists, but also for policy makers who want to understand the fundamental issues of civil–military relations in the world’s largest democracy. As a historian of the Indian Army’s pre-1947 period, I found that this monograph has greatly expanded my understanding of the post-1947 Indian Army.

Steven Wilkinson has been meticulous in his research and has ably balanced two very important academic disciplines to support his key theses. He merges historical and quantitative analysis in a fashion that is coherent and clear to readers and his monograph is built upon an excellent understanding of the foundational themes of the Indian Army in the pre-1947 period, outlined in two early chapters. His research and analysis dealing with the era of partition and the immediate aftermath of independence in the chapter ‘Protecting the New Democracy’ is the key to our understanding of how the army became an element of national power within the newly independent state—as compared, for instance, to the path the Pakistan Army took in the post-1947 period.

The book is laid out chronologically and thematically, and the organisation works extremely well. Wilkinson’s critical analyses of some of the key political debates of the post-independence period—in particular civil–military relations and ethnic and regional recruitment—offer a fresh perspective on some of the difficult ‘nationalist’ narratives that have come to shape our understanding of the army in the post-1947 period.

The civil–military relations is a key theme throughout the book; Wilkinson has researched and debated it thoroughly, and his treatment provides a new and clearer understanding of the difficulties of transition for independent states and the role of a professional military in that context. The critical analysis of archival interviews and research offers truly excellent insight into the debates in which the various ruling parties were engaged with their senior Indian Army counterparts. These senior generals had straddled two different masters—the British and Indian governments—and Wilkinson shows the thorny path both sides followed. His concluding comments in the chapter ‘Army and Nation Today’, where he discusses ‘troop movements’ in 2012, hint that the debates surrounding civil–military relations continue to create tension. Chapter 6, ‘Path Not Taken: Pakistan 1947–1977’, gives a brief overview of the differences between India and Pakistan in the post-1947 period; this chapter hints at the possibility of a much larger monograph in the future, which would be welcome, building as it naturally would upon the excellent past work of Ayesha Jalal, Stephen Cohen and Ian Talbot.

Another key issue that Wilkinson has meticulously researched and critically analysed is the debate surrounding the ethnic composition of the army in the post-1947 period. This theme may be one of the more controversial in the book. For all the outspoken opposition to the British ‘martial races’ policy in the pre-1947 period, it took the newly independent Indian government years to attempt to shift recruitment practices towards a more ‘national army’. And even now, the transformation has not achieved the diverse force that many pre-1947 nationalist leaders envisioned. Wilkinson’s meticulous use of graphs, maps and quantitative analysis in exploring this theme provides a masterly and objective examination of a topic which has for long been and still remains contentious.

Wilkinson’s work addresses important questions that academics and policy makers have had regarding the evolution of the Indian Army in the post-1947 period. In his conclusion, he states, ‘India has managed to overcome the disadvantages of its colonial legacy. India has had uninterrupted civilian rule since independence. . . . [T]o Indian politicians, nearly seven decades after independence, the army no longer appears a threatening and authoritarian force, but instead the focus of national pride’ (p. 218). This book through extensive research and excellent critical analysis makes clear how this transformation has occurred. This book is essential not only for anyone studying, researching and teaching on India in the post-1947 era; it also provides important lessons for academics, students and policy makers—as long as they understand the key contextual background to India and its relationship with its army, which this book will help them to do. I agree with Stephen Cohen’s assessment: ‘There has been nothing like Army and nation in the last forty years which is astonishing given the importance of the army in India.’