Over the past three years, I wondered if as 16-year-old boys, the majority of us who passed out from school four decades ago were wimps and chose the wrong career. Ours was a small north Indian town, a perfect sangam of the oldest engineering college (later university) in Asia, headquarters of a prestigious regiment of the Army’s Corps of Engineers and a couple of the CSIR laboratories. We prided ourselves for the town was once the base of the most elaborate canal system in British India — the upper Ganga canal, which still irrigates swathes of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Our school was within the Army cantonment and we would often cycle past a captured Pakistani Patton tank, put on display as a symbol of Indian military might in the Battle of Asal Uttar in the 1965 war. It made us proud but motivated not even a handful of us to consider joining the Army which, in the early 1970s, remained an alternate career at best in our town.
Like most schools, ours too organised annual trips lasting several days, and once when we were in Class 5 we returned from the National Defence Academy most impressed with its mechanised kitchen. I don’t remember the NDA instructors who took us around, giving a pep talk on virtues of a career in the services. When the abandon of school life was nearing its end and we contemplated career choices, not many took a shot at joining the armed forces. I was not alone in concluding that the Army was not my calling, preferring to pursue a life of letters. At least one of the two of us who eventually joined the services followed family tradition and that at no point was considered special. It crossed no one’s mind that those joining the Army were more patriotic.
In today’s India, our choice would have been difficult to make. If joining the Army is not stated as the most preferred choice, either commitment to the nation is questioned or the lad will be painted as a wimp.
Even before the Chief of Army Staff stepped into the political arena and began making statements that are totally beyond his brief, India had begun warming up to the idea of the Army’s sacrosanctness. As the political script under the BJP altered from when it was shaped by the concept of cultural nationalism, to when it became driven more by a muscular version of nationalism, and eventually to today’s framework of militarist nationalism, questioning any action of the Army began to be painted as treasonous.
Under the Narendra Modi government, a new holy cow has been added to existing ones — defence and foreign policies — that people are not expected to question or criticise, and this is the Army. Earlier, despite the hard job that the armed forces were often tasked with in the country, the Army was not only provided a clear identifiable set of objectives but also instructed on the legal framework that it was not to violate under any circumstances. But as this government began hyperventilating over the issue of patriotism and discovering symptoms of anti-nationalism at the slightest of contrarian thought, the Army became the new holy cow and got leeway on legal boundaries. Criticising its actions and accusing it of violating human rights has been consistently branded as anti-nationalism.
One of the pitfalls of ever-increasing space for the unregulated media is that one doesn’t any longer have to “be someone” to broadcast even the most objectionable view. The social media ensures anyone can pulverise the other in the name of the nation or “national cause”. The nation is always a good moralistic cause, and anyone who questions the Hanumans of Maryada Purushottam are entitled to damn others most vilely. In contemporary depiction, the Army is representative of the monkey god, while the nation is illustrative of Lord Ram. In such a situation, those taking critical potshots at the Army or pointing to repeated human rights violations or even arguing that undemocratic laws like AFSPA must be scrapped, become soft targets. Slowly but stealthily, the Army has become synonymous with the nation.
Thus, the carefully delineated space between the political executive and the Army is getting obliterated. Increasingly, this government is allowing the civil-military relations, previously debated away from the public glare, to be discussed on public media platforms. Populist pressure is formulating policy. The government expresses no disapproval when the military leadership makes political statements. The ruling party acquiesces to this as jingoism from Army quarters enables the BJP to consolidate its political base. It, however, will have deep ramifications eventually and there is no knowing if after concluding they played a key role in shaping government policy, the armed forces may not want a more direct role.
The government permitted the Army to take the lead since February when Gen. Bipin Rawat said anyone obstructing Army operations would be treated as “overground workers of terrorists”, declared as “anti-nationals” and not spared. The statement was made while paying tribute to the Army personnel martyred in encounters in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As it was political in content and intent, such a declaration should have come from the Prime Minister.
By allowing Gen. Rawat to sharpen the social divide on the human-shield issue and awarding a medal to Maj. Nitin Leetul Gogoi, the government has slipped deeper into a crevice from where it will find it hard to extricate itself.
The Army must remain ready for a command performance but should never be the one to order a policy. Unfortunately, this is what has happened in the past three years, and the middle-class romance with a phase of Army rule lurks alarmingly close. Providing political legitimacy or politically empowering the Army is always a bad idea.
