In pursuit of its ideological project, government is compromising military professionalism

Ghazala Wahab

Many well-meaning veterans and civilians have been dismayed by the overt display of religiosity by serving officers, including chiefs, through publicised visits to religious sites in uniform or use of religion infused language in public discourse. They quaintly rue this as politicisation of the Indian armed forces. I regard it as communalisation, which to my mind preceded politicisation.

However, both these terms, being reductive in nature, do not fully explain the competitive expression of bigoted/ politicised behaviour by the senior officers. And it is not only to win favour with the government of the day either, though it may be an overriding factor for some. The truth is, since 2014, bigotry and blind allegiance to one political thought has crept in, in the garb of Indianisation of the military, which is increasingly indistinguishable from Hinduisation. 

Of all its various projects, the one in which the Rashtra Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which ideologically steers the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been extremely successful in, it’s conflation of Indian with Hindu, to the extent that even the Supreme Court of India in a 1966 judgement observed that ‘Hinduism is a way of life and nothing more.’ Implicit in that was the idea that the Indian way of life is the Hindu way of life. So, today when senior officers publicly embrace their Hinduism or try to reorient their service ethos according to Hindu scriptures, they are merely taking pride in asserting their Indianness, shedding the colonial baggage.

But before going any further, a brief recap of the legacy of civil-military relations that the present BJP government, now in its third term, inherited. For 67 years, one institution that all independent Indian governments did not tinker with—barring a few exceptions of political interference in promotions—was the Indian military. All governments accepted the sanctity of the British inherited military ethos, traditions, uniforms, training principles and even history. And except on a couple of occasions, it allowed seniority to determine promotions at flag ranks, including chiefs.

Of the two major incidents of political interference, the first one occurred in 1961, when Prime Minister Nehru accepted the appointment of Lt. Gen. B.M. Kaul as chiefs of staff on the recommendation of defence minister V.K. Krishna Menon. This was against the advice of the outgoing Chief of Army Staff, General K.S. Thimayya, who deemed Kaul unfit for the role, given his non-combat experience. Nehru ostensibly agreed with Kaul’s appointment because he was a fellow Kashmiri. The immediate and the long-term consequences of this are too well known--the 1962 calamitous war with China and its permanent shadow upon the relations between the two countries. Over the years, this one uneasy relationship continues to determine India’s foreign policy.