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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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.