Abstract
India is unusual in many ways among the comity of modern nation-states. It is a rare large nation-state that was borne out of non-violent protests, although the birth itself was unusually bloody. Freedom fighters who took to arms only find peripheral mention in a history bathed in Gandhian ideals.
India does not have many military heroes unlike the independence heritage of most others, and military heroism and ethos thus are not ingrained into our national psyche in a significant way. Legacy of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose, and others such as Bhagat Singh, who took up arms against the colonial masters, are scattered, and together do not match up to the way Gandhian ahimsa captured the national and international imagination.
Unlike India, large democracies such as those in Europe and Americas, and even most in Africa have a very strong legacy of armed struggle in their independence movements. And this helps shape a better appreciation of the central role of military in modern nation-states, and create a vibrant and widespread appreciation of military sacrifices and heroism.
Such lack of military legacy is among the factors that need to be analysed in detail to understand India’s skewed civil–military relations, the peripheral role of military in grand policy makings, and continuing struggle of India to find a modern and fair civil–military relationship that is suitable for a nuclear power with complex boundaries and competing neighbours.
Ayesha Ray’s The Soldier and the State in India provides an impressive academic framework to understand the state of relationship between political–bureaucratic setup and the military establishment in India. She draws on the framework evolved by Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State, the path-breaking work published in 1957 that has given a modern architecture to analyse and understand civil–military relations in nation-states. Huntington’s masterpiece remains a reference manual for anyone trying to understand military officer corps as a profession for management of violence, and the tenuous ties that exist in every nation between the military and civilian leadership.
Ayesha’s book improvises on global references to bring in a framework to understand the Indian realities. She gives a detailed narrative of independent India’s experience of civil–military relations. Starting with Jawaharlal Nehru’s deep concerns about military emerging in public display of its power and his attempts to clamp civilian control to the disastrous 1962 war with China and VK Krishna Menon’s unwanted muddling in military affairs, the book documents the history of India’s experience of keeping military–civil relations in balance during Nehruvian era. This was the period when Pakistan had already experienced its first successful military coup.
The book goes on to discuss in detail the post-1962 corrections in civil– military ties, and the tactical freedom that army and its sister organisations enjoyed in future, especially in wars such as the two in 1965 and 1971 fought with Pakistan.
Ayesha goes on to trace the evolution of nuclear weapons, and the role of Indian military vis-à-vis the US military in terms of controlling these political weapons. She goes on to discuss the role of Indian military in unconventional warfare, against militancy in northeast and Kashmir.
Ayesha’s book is a definite good addition to the academic understanding of civil–military relations in India, and she takes forward to a limited extent the work of other military experts such as Stephen Cohen.
However, this book, like most others on Indian military, suffers from the absence of enough deep studies about specific episodes that have had far reaching impact on civil–military relations in India than what is known or accepted in public. The writer cannot be blamed for it, because Indian ruling class, be it the cabinet members, defence ministers, senior civil servants or military leaders, none of them are intellectually honest enough to recount without bias what really transpired during a specific episode. So what you get is only coloured versions of an event, and in most cases these players are not willing to discuss specifics. For them history is what they interpret at their convenience, not what really happened behind the Iron Curtain of Indian governance.
Several such episodes of recent past have majorly contributed to adversely altering the military perspective of already ignorant political leadership. The recent controversial tenure of General V.K. Singh as the army chief buttresses my argument very well. As a senior Lieutenant General heading Eastern Army command, he gave a written undertaking that he would accept the government’s decision on his age, and this undertaking ensured that he became the army chief despite significant opposition to his candidature from all around.
General Singh surprisingly went back on his commitment, and dragged the government to the Supreme Court. The fallout of this seemingly ‘administrative’ stand-off has been dramatic on reformation of military higher management, on civil–military relations and the overall status of military in political decision-making. It is a story that is yet waiting to be written in full. Limited reports about unauthorised movement of troops towards New Delhi by the Army just as Gen Singh moved Supreme Court on the age issue have only narrated limited facts. For several hours, political leadership of the country was gripped with uncertainty and concern, and those few hours have damaged further civilian trust in military leadership and the need to grant them further autonomy.
It is such episodes that need to be studied in detail to build a more robust narrative of India’s civil–military relationship, and Ayesha Ray’s The Soldier and the State in India provides a firm foundation for such a future effort.