ON INDIAN ARMY 

& ITS OFFICERS

By Iqbal Malhotra INTRODUCTION  Over the last three years, I have been fortunate to produce five feature-length documentaries for Discovery Channel on subjects involving the Indian Army. I have closely interacted with the Northern Command and officers of the XIVth, XVth and XVIth Corps of the Army, from Lieutenant Generals to Captains. It has been a really rewarding and informative experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find that even the younger officers posted at the LoC have a well-developed strategic perspective on the expectations that we have from the Army and the limitations under which they operate. The officers are secular, seasoned and mature in their outlook, and this stems from the traditions and training that the Army inherited from the British. It is these values and responsibilities that make the Indian Army an extremely professional organisation. I recollect visiting the VIth Grenadiers at the LoC and was impressed to see the battallion temple and mosque standing side by side, and both the pandit and maulvi eating together at the reception organised by the Commanding Officer. It made me proud to see such unity in our otherwise extremely fractured polity today. Unfortunately, the new rulers of post-Independence India did away with the parity, privileges and pensions that the Indian Army enjoyed with its civilian counterparts in the ICS and IAS. This was a deliberate exercise to ring-fence the Army and ensure that it was not only permanently downgraded, vis-a-vis the bureaucracy, but it took away the Army’s authority while continuing to keep it accountable. The Army thus had to improvise and fend for itself. Simultaneously, afraid of a potential coup, the politician created a vast “second army” in the form of a plethora of para-military forces, which were directly under bureaucratic control and owed their loyalty to the bureaucracy and not to their own command structures. This also enabled the politician-bureaucratic nexus to engage in “manufactured internal wars” against all manner of insurgents, which provided immense opportunities to make vast amounts of money. A case in point is the annual cost to the country of waging the war against the Maoists. While all this was happening, across the border, the Officer Corps of the Pakistan Army was elevated to the status of the most privileged body in that polity and was the recipient of privileges, patronage and power that was unparalleled in our country. This attracted the best talent in Pakistan to the Army as the passion for soldiering was fuelled by privileges. In light of these glaring systemic distortions and its intransigence and lack of generosity in granting the One Rank One Pension (OROP) package parity that veterans are agitating for, the government is ensuring that only those youngsters fuelled by passion will enlist. What about others sitting on the fence? If the systemic distortions are rapidly removed, it may be possible to bridge the shortfall in officers that the Army is currently facing. Our country needs this, because we face unparalleled strategic threats to our security and require an Officer Corps in the Armed Forces that is both capable and secure to deal with them. The government needs to act fast. It needs to resolve OROP and rapidly upgrade the officer package to attract our best young men and women. It needs to cut down on manufactured conflicts and divert those resources to where they are really needed. The author is a filmmaker