Abstract
In the first serious monograph-length analysis of India’s post-independence military for the last half a century, Steven Wilkinson’s latest book asks one of the most important questions about the relationship between state, politics and military establishment in South Asia: how do we account for the democratic divergence between India and Pakistan in the army, and why didn’t India’s army threaten political stability in the way that its counterpart did across the border?
As well as extending this central question over space and region, Wilkinson also strongly connects his account of India’s military to historical, and specifically colonial, legacies. One might expect that the Raj’s army, being composed in an ethnically cohesive way, should have been in a position to challenge India’s democratic institutions. Other accounts have suggested that the British espousal of professional qualities kept politics out of the mess. For Wilkinson this explanation is not sufficient, not least because it also applies to Pakistan, but more importantly because no serious efforts were made to dismantle the ‘colonial style’ army. Instead, Wilkinson develops a multi-faceted argument traced out across the book’s chapters which point to the weakness of Pakistan’s inheritance; the structural strength of the Congress party in India (a form of ‘party institutionalization’), including its broad ethnic and regional support; and finally, the ‘coup proofing’ measures of the Indian state in its first decade, such as decreasing the political power of the Army’s heads and decreasing the period of tenure of high level personnel. These measures and developments, for Wilkinson, prevented religion too from becoming a ‘micro-leverage’ issue.
The opening two chapters examine the transition from colonial legacies into the early independence period, examining the Army’s colonial military structure, its use of a ‘divide and rule’ strategy to prevent mutiny, and how developments of the Second World War period survived into post-independence India. Through painstaking research into recruitment, Wilkinson shows how the martial classes’ strategy was not dismantled over the 1940s (pp.68–75), despite the extraordinary problems surrounding partition and the fears of ethnic violence on a mass scale. No doubt Wilkinson has more data up his sleeve to examine the effects of demobilized soldiers on partition violence, and it was tempting to draw conclusions about that here. This, however, was not the main focus of the book.
Chapters 3 and 4 move us clearly into the post-independence period to look, first, at the first half of the Nehruvian period and then to examine the China War and the Emergency of 1975–7. Wilkinson argues that although the intention was to democratize the Army, this did not ultimately take place, and other structures were put in place by the Congress regime to minimize the military threat. This chapter extends one of the central points of the book around the structural strength of the Congress party in India and the means by which it developed structures and policies to forestall a military coup. Troubles in Kashmir and Hyderabad hindered this effort, but the Congress regime’s ‘compositional strategies’ of ensuring that no ethnic group predominated in the military proved to be effective (pp.107–110). Wilkinson does not simply look at this from the perspective of internal military policy, but also links success to Congress strategy around such issues as the linguistic reorganization of provinces (pp.118–120). In a sense, the content of Chapter 4, moving between the defeat to China in 1962, to the two wars with Pakistan (1965 and 1971), intervention in the Sri Lankan Civil War and the Emergency, illustrates the very effective measures of the Congress regime in that period.
The final two chapters of the book continue to explore the nature of recruitment into the Army and discuss the issue of continuity in recruiting around ethnic and class homogeneities. One of the reasons for the ‘stickiness’ of ethnicity, as Wilkinson puts it, is the ease with which recruitment drew upon the same regions (p.182). One of the key changes, however, is a growing sense of civilian nervousness about the power of the military in India, as political parties have become more fractured since the turn of the millennium. The final chapter returns us to a discussion of the principal difference between the civilian-military structure in Pakistan and that of India, reinforcing the arguments for why the Army has become entrenched in Pakistani society.
More than just an exploration of India’s military history, Army and Nation combines the deep quantitative and qualitative research reminiscent of Wilkinson’s previous books on Indian elections with a wider, region-wide exploration of the relationship between military and civilian power.
As a result, the book is perhaps the most rigorous and analytical of its kind for decades. Its larger concluding point, and something implied throughout the work, concerns what lessons might be taken from the Indian and Pakistani experience for other contexts. Here, Wilkinson points to questions around how democracies break down, and how the India/Pakistan case illustrates the need to look in detail at the combined factors of organization and control, in combination with those around the stability of a polity (p.223). Focus on the structural/organizational aspects of the military meant that some important narratives around the Army’s operation and role in conflicts were not explored in depth in this book, notably those of Jammu and Kashmir and internal counterinsurgency in the North East/Assam. This, however, was not the principal aim of the work, which without doubt, will be one of the main points of reference for the Indian Army for many years to come.