Civil-military relations in India

The army remains the final arbiter

Stephen Cohen in his book, ‘The Indian Army’ states that “De Tocqueville and other theorists argued that democracy and a large standing army were incompatible, but India has managed both.” This act of ‘management’ has not been easy as the civil-military relations in India have been scarred by several strains and stresses. While the British colonists looked up to the Indian army as “an oasis in desert of chaos,” to the Congress guru Gandhi, it was merely a tool of colonial coercion and thus an object of “people’s hatred” as it had been “employed in indiscriminate firing” on the masses.

As to who would exercise real power in the state’s polity in colonial India, the army’s standing was laid bare by its Chief Field Marshal Philip Chetwode in 1932, when he elaborated, “An army can have no politics…. [It] is at the disposal of the government…” However, India’s first Premier Jawaharlal Nehru knew that it would not be easy to ride this ‘tiger’ as more than anyone, he well-understood the classical Maoist dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

To ride this ‘tiger’, one can discern a three-pronged Nehruvian strategy with regard to the Indian army. The first was to keep its budget low in the name of economy; exhibit a gesture of peace towards the neighboring countries; and to maintain a military that was more compact and mobile rather than inflated in numbers. In December 1950, he went public by stating that he preferred a highly mechanised but small army and also decided to reduce its size for reasons of economy. Despite these pronouncements, when the first Indian Army Chief K M Carippa approached Nehru in 1951 for more defence outlay to strengthen the north-eastern frontier against China, he was nonchalantly told, “You mind only Kashmir and Pakistan” – a decision that Nehru was to regret after his defeat at the hands of the Chinese in the 1962 war.

The second aspect of his strategy was devised in consultation with his Home Minister Sardar Patel whereby as a counterpoise to the army, both planned to increase the strength of the paramilitary forces.

The third aspect of the civil-military relations that really irked the latter was postulated by Nehru through his confidante and Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon, who is on the record to have said, “It is wrong for the army to try to make policy, their business is to be concerned with military tactics…. The government is not going to say that it wants one company here and two companies there, but the government will certainly say, ‘We should attack Pakistan’ or ‘we should not attack Pakistan’.” Ironically, both of them did not adhere to this self-professed principle because Lt Gen S L Menezes (retd), who served the Indian army for over thirty-seven years, has revealed in his history of ‘The Indian Army’ that both Nehru and Menon constantly interfered in the army operations during the 1962 Sino-Indian war “before the operations as to the deployment even of companies and platoons.” With an unsparing stick to beat Menon, Menezes ruefully adds that conflict was the leitmotif of Menon’s life as he often threatened court-martial to even those officers who dared to ask genuine questions in the defence briefings.

No wonder, he was the most hated defence minister of India as two instances clearly indicate. One, some anonymous army officers wrote a letter to Nehru in 1961 alleging that “the Defence Minister… seems to wield some black magic… over the Prime Minister.” Two, the more outlandish step stated by W Hangen, the author of ‘After Nehru, who?’ in which he claimed that “Indian officers actually approached a Western attaché in New Delhi for help in arranging to have Menon assassinated.” The top brass also resented Menon’s interference in promotions so much so that the Army Chief General K S Thimayya resigned in protest in 1950 but retracted on Nehru’s request.

In spite of such a shabby treatment of the Khakis, the Indian army has played a key role in keeping the façade of the Indian democracy by aiding the civil power whenever called for help. If somehow India has avoided disintegration, civil war and communal strife, it has not been because of the sagacity of the civilian governments but because of its army. Facts speak for themselves. Over the decades, the army has ensured the survival of the political governments in three broad ways. First, it has bailed out the politicians by fighting large scale counter-insurgency operations such as against the communists in Telengana in 1949; against the separatist Sikhs under ‘Operation Blue Star’ and ‘Operation Woodrose’ in 1984; and to quell Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in 1987 as the ‘Indian Peace-Keeping Force’ where it earned the sobriquet of ‘Indian Peace-Keeping Dogs.’

Second, the Indian army has been called out by the political governments to disarm the rebellious paramilitary forces such as the Bihar Police in 1947 and the UP Provincial Armed Constabulary in 1973. Third, to pacify major communal riots, the civilian governments have used the coercive power of the army on at least 475 occasions between1951-70 and 369 times between 1981and ’85. Moreover, the 1991-92 annual report of the Ministry of Defence admitted that the army was used to quell urban violence in over a dozen provinces of India. The above statistics are a poor reflection on the working of the Indian democracy; without the military crutches, it may not have survived these ‘storms.’

The next question that begs an answer is to what extent was the character of the independent Indian democratic state as envisioned by Nehru was to be any different from the oppressive colonial state? Not much really as is evident from a recorded conversation between the last Viceroy Mountbatten and Nehru in March 1947, on the eve of partition: ‘I asked Nehru if he agreed that the army was the final guarantor of law and order…. He agreed.” Even Gandhi’s desire of turning the coercive nature of army into a constructive force that “must plough the land, dig wells, clean latrines, and do every other constructive work” has remained an elusive dream. Whether the Indians accept or not, the fact is that the army remains the ultimate guardian of the Indian democracy.

The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]