Politics and men in uniform

For first few years of my Army career, I served in a Jat Regiment battalion in Burma during the Second World War and after. Jats are good soldiers and also good sportsmen. I have fond memories of my service with Jat troops. The Jat stir in Haryana caused me much anguish. The national capital was held hostage for water.

A newspaper reported that the Army had been called out in Haryana and placed under the additional director-general of police. This was bizarre. The Army is never placed under the police or even the state government. The strong reaction of Army veterans against this went viral on the Internet. I was flooded with emails. Thankfully, this report was found to be incorrect. The Haryana government requested Army aid and five Army battalions were deployed. Army veterans, mostly Jats, cooperated with the Army. Normalcy was soon restored.

I was surprised to see pictures of Army columns on the roads in Haryana carrying Army placards so that they are not mistaken for the police or the paramilitary. The latter have been increasingly adopting the same uniform as the Army. This reminded me of 1946 when I was posted in Military Operations Directorate at Army Headquarters. After the war there was a popular desire to revert to khaki from olive green, which was used by the Indian Army in Burma for camouflage. The bulk of the Indian Army overseas was serving there. The quality of olive green cloth was not very good and the colour would soon fade. We used to colour our uniforms to maintain its shade. Khaki was our pre-war uniform and looked smarter. There were millions of bales of olive green cloth in our depots, which would have been wasted if we discarded olive green uniforms. Field Marshal Auchinleck decided that the Indian Army should continue with wartime olive green. He saw increasing violence in the country during the coming years. Green uniform, different from the police, will have a deterrent effect. I saw the wisdom of this decision in 1965 during large-scale disturbances in Kolkata when Jyoti Basu was arrested. The state government requested Army assistance to restore order. I was then commanding the Fort William garrison comprising my battalion and additional troops. I was also officiating as the Brigade Commander at that time. The Army’s presence was a deterrent. We restored order in three days using minimum force.

Reverting to the Jat stir in Haryana, there was total chaos for four days from February 19 to 23. Innocent people were killed, 17 railway stations were burnt. Several buses and cars were also burnt on the highway and their passengers dragged and beaten. There were even reports of women being raped in the fields. Property worth Rs 28,000 crore was destroyed. This will deter our “Make in India” programme. Investors will hesitate to invest in the fast-growing economy of Haryana. Besides the civil police there were five state armed police battalions and 10 Central Reserve Police Force battalions available to the state government. Yet the government remained paralysed. Five battalions of the Army restored order in two days. An IAS officer of the Haryana cadre wrote in the Tribune, “Bloated civil police and paramilitary forces that continue to grow, but remain incapable of maintaining law and order.” We need to examine the reasons for this pathetic state of affairs.

Unscrupulous political leaders using the police as their handmaiden and partners in crime and corruption are primarily responsible for this most unfortunate state of affairs. Recommendations of the National Police Commission and injunctions of the Supreme Court have been ignored. There is no doubt these are the main causes for the desperate state of affairs. However, within the police there are several faultlines which need to be fixed. The police station, the frontline of police administration and the police beat system, remains ignored. The emphasis is on militarisation of police and use of military trappings which did not exist earlier. In the process, the police lost its culture and ethos. The police has not shed its image of a colonial force to become a people-friendly force in a democracy as it has in Britain. The police station is shunned by the common man who sees it as a centre of corruption and torture. The police now has a very top-heavy rank structure. It has more generals than soldiers. A new level of command between state police headquarters and deputy inspector-general of police range, the inspector-general zone, has been introduced. It only adds flab and delays police functioning. A senior rank in the force has to have supporting personnel adding more tail than teeth to a force. In 1947, and for a decade later, Uttar Pradesh had one IG rank officer commanding the entire police force in the state. Today it has 106 officers of the rank of IG and above. True the strength of the force is today much more than before and policing is becoming increasingly complex, but does that justify such a massive increase of police generals in the state The IAS has, of course, done better many times over, and so has the Army to keep up with the Joneses, but the latter to a lesser extent.

The Army, the paramilitary and the police have well defined roles. The Army’s primary role is defence of the border and secondary to assist the civil authority in restoring law and order when called upon to do so, plus provide succour during natural disasters. Vallabhbhai Patel wisely decided to increase the strength of paramilitary forces so that the Army does not have to be employed in maintaining order while fighting the enemy on the border. From two battalions of Crown representative police we now have 200 battalions of CRPF, the largest such force in the world, but there is no let-up in employing the Army for internal security. The paramilitary units on the border are required for border policing and not border defence. There is a huge difference between the two. Yet the paramilitary on the border are increasingly acting as a border defence force — the BSF on the international border with Pakistan, and Indo-Tibetan Border Police on the border with China, report to the ministry of home affairs. At this rate, in the event of war, they may be fighting their own wars as a parallel force.

The Indian Army has been the ultimate weapon of the nation and it has never failed to rise to the occasion in service of the nation. It is the only apolitical Army of the developing world. Yet it is the most neglected and marginalised in decision-making and in emoluments. Its protocol status has been persistently lowered. All this should be a matter of national concern.

The writer, a retired lieutenant-general, was Vice-Chief of Army Staff and has served as governor of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir