The article below explores Why India Succeeded (And Pakistan Failed) In Keeping The Army Out Of Politics !!!
It is not often that a senior government official publicly recommends a book by an academic, especially if the former is in the Pakistani military and the latter at an American university. However, that is exactly what Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s new Chief of Army Staff, did in December 2016 during a gathering of senior army officers at Rawalpindi Garrison in the General Headquarters. The military had no business in running the government, Pakistani newspaper The Nation quoted Bajwa as saying, and the General asked the gathering to read Steven Wilkinson’s Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy Since Independence to understand civil-military relations in Pakistan’s arch rival.
Broadly, Wilkinson asks a question that has perplexed many a scholar of postcolonial states – why have most of them proven inhospitable for the germination of liberal democracy and fallen to authoritarianism of various hues? Army and Nation focuses on one specific aspect of the answer, namely, the role of the military and its relation to the civilian leadership. Although ostensibly about India, the book cannot but be a commentary on Pakistan as well seeing as how the Islamic state deliberately positioned itself as anti-India.
India and Pakistan present, in many ways, an interesting case study of a people with similar cultural heritage that diverged at independence and ended in drastically different spots on the political spectrum.
Wilkinson argues that the reason for India’s success in keeping the military out of political power is the apprehension of the Indian National Congress towards the profession of arms. Having participated, even minimally, in government, Congress leaders had administrative experience in thinking about the challenges their new country might face.
Nirad C Chaudhuri, for example, had argued for a more representative Indian military that was free of foreign officers in a 1935 policy paper; similarly, in 1938, V V Kalikar moved a resolution in the Council of States to restructure the Indian army more representatively.
As a result, Congress moved quickly after Independence to convert a colonial force that was fuelled by communal fissures to one that was more representative and firmly under the control of the civilian leadership.
The Muslim League, on the other hand, had no such experience and complacently believed that statehood along confessional lines would solve all problems. It is such naivete that has led many to argue that Pakistan was insufficiently imagined; one must be careful, however, in differentiating between a thoroughly imagined nation and an insufficiently imagined state.
Punjabi over-representation in the army started from 1857, when India’s imperial master stopped recruiting troops from the Gangetic plains and instead brought in communities that had been loyal to Britain in the mutiny. This was the same pattern of recruitment the Crown followed in Nigeria, Ghana, Iraq, or elsewhere in the empire – favour minority communities against the larger population of the region. As a result, 60 per cent of the Indian army was from Punjab on the eve of World War Two. That number fell to 32 per cent within a year of Independence, admittedly aided in no small measure by Partition.
The Congress leadership, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Baldev Singh, and others took several measures to insure against the military.
First, officers commissioned after 1935 were given a massive 40 per cent wage cut. Next, the commander-in-chief of the Indian army was removed from the governor-general’s executive council in 1947 and made him responsible to the Minister of Defence; eight years later, they abolished the post completely and the military was served by three service chiefs with lesser power and of equal status despite the size and importance of their service.
Symbolically, Nehru took over the residence of the commander-in-chief, Teen Murti Bhavan, as the civilian prime minister’s official habitation.
Three, a new military academy was created in Pune; the National Defence Academy would offer a different vertical from that of the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. Along with careful recruitment, this would aid in the diversification among senior officers. The tenure for senior generals was also shortened and extension of their term became exceedingly rare.
To ensure that retired officers could not act on their political beliefs with the support of their uniformed comrades, senior posts were deputed to the Ministry of External Affairs which posted them to international destinations, separate from each other and distant to India. Nehru was not beyond using his intelligence agencies to keep a close eye on the military elite.
Lt Gen SD Verma describes, for example, how, in 1960, he had to take a boat out to the middle of Nagin lake to speak privately to then CoAS KS Thimayya for fear that they were being spied upon. The corruption, bureaucratic lethargy, and lack of political vision in Indian politics frustrated many Indian service chiefs and some spoke approvingly of a short stint in power for the military – to “clean up” – and the limitation of universal adult suffrage to the literate population. Given the understanding shown by some of the senior Indian military officials to their former classmates from Sandhurst who had seized power in Pakistan, Nehru’s suspicions do not seem entirely unwarranted.
Another measure the Indian government took to ensure that the military does not enter politics is the creation of a large paramilitary force. Although such a force is no match to the regular army, it meant that the army need not be deployed extensively for domestic peacekeeping operations. This kept the army relatively isolated from national life. Civilian leaders thus hedged against the military in a manner similar to how the British placed white or Gurkha troops alongside suspect Indian units.
Wilkinson points out that while some diversification did happen in the Indian military, delivery fell far short of promises. The conflict over Kashmir in 1948, internal instability, nascent separatist tendencies, and the wars with Pakistan and China gave little room for a complete restructuring of the Indian military. Nonetheless, there has been a substantial change in the composition of the armed forces since independence.
Army and Nation etches out the path not taken by Pakistan. There were no efforts by Rawalpindi to forge a genuinely representative army. In fact, the cultural hostility between Punjabis and Bengalis impeded the integration of East Pakistan into Pakistani national life – something amply proved by the war in 1971 and subsequent secession. On the whole, Wilkinson is soft on Pakistan’s democratic failure. He argues that the country was dealt a worse socioeconomic and military hand that was compounded by the Muslim League’s amateur approach to national politics. It must be remembered, however, that this hand was demanded by the founding fathers of the Islamic state – neither the national religious imagination, the borders, and the population exchange were imposed upon Karachi by London or Delhi. Furthermore, conflict in Kashmir was sought, despite the challenges posed by inheriting a new state, by the Pakistani military whose raison d’etre was anti-Indian.
India’s solution to the potential for a military coup has come at a cost – the army has been unable to function efficiently and its role as a mute spectator in policy planning has left it unable to defend India’s borders as China showed in 1962.
Civilian bureaucrats and politicians, the prime minister included, declared policies without making the necessary material and logistical provisions for them. Thus, Nehru embarked on his Forward Policy on the China border despite repeated warnings from officers on the ground that India’s forces were ill-prepared to handle any potential repercussions from the Chinese side.
Was the Congress’ evisceration of the military really necessary?
Studies have repeatedly shown that class militaries – units drawn from similar ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other groups – perform better in combat owing to their closer bonding. The risks posed by such recruitment can be mitigated to a large extent by extensive training, professionalisation, and the weaving of a strong inclusive nationalist narrative.
Congress leaders clearly did not trust their citizens to be ready for this sort of reform or were unable to implement it themselves. More importantly, the road not chosen hints at another way in which India and Pakistan stand as mirror images of each other: while Pakistan was a well-imagined nation and poorly envisaged state, India was the exact opposite in being a fairly well envisaged state and poorly imagined nation.
Lost in the effort to control all the things that divided Indians, Nehru did not see what united his countrymen – or if he did, chose to ignore it and refashion them after his own image. Wilkinson’s study is an interesting hypothesis in not just what it says but also what it thus implies, for India as well as for Pakistan.
Army and Nation acknowledges the myriad other factors that have flavoured the divergence between India and Pakistan but is nonetheless the study of one institution and the reader’s judgment should be restricted to the topic at hand.
An interesting comparison, which Wilkinson briefly alludes to in his introduction, is the Israeli state and army. While religiously homogeneous, immigrants to the Holy Land in the early years of the Jewish state were ethnically diverse. Tel Aviv managed to shape them in to trustworthy soldiers even so. What were the effects of literacy levels in the population on the army?
Bajwa’s boys will benefit greatly from reading Wilkinson’s book as they will from Christine Fair’s Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, or Myra MacDonald’s Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War. The COAS is known to be a keen observer of India whose interest goes back to his days as a young major serving at the Line of Control. His then commanding officer, Brigadier (retd) Feroz Hassan Khan, says that Bajwa belies the stereotype of the Pakistani military officer as someone who holds a visceral hatred towards India. It will be interesting to see if this alleged change in personality will amount to anything more substantial.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.