The Department of Military Affairs (DMA)linkisexploring a proposal for a three-year Tour of Duty (ToD) fornon-commissioned personnel or *Jawans* that first emerged under the lateChief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat. The case for a three-yearstint for Jawans stems from a desire to curb the high revenue budgetcovering salaries and pensions of the Indian Army (IA). According to theproposal, following their three-year ToD, the decommissioned personnel whowould still be in their 20s can be absorbed by the state police forces orservice the security requirements of corporate India.
The IA consumes a significant part of its allocated budget leaving littlefor capital expenditure or money for new weapons and platforms impactingthe equipment modernisation of the service. There are several objectionsthat have been proffered for why it is wise not to pursue this latestproposal. On the other hand, supporters of the move make the case for areduction link in the sizeof the army as necessary to push a hidebound IA to evolve in meeting therequirements of agility, combined arms warfare, and high tempo operations.
The status quo of leaving things as they are is also unacceptable given theballooning pension and salary bill of the IA restricting the service’scapacity to integrate new technologies, modernise equipment, and trainpersonnel for complex tasks and missions. In any case, the proposal isexperimental and exploratory and may still be subject to revision. However,the proposal has triggered an intense debate. The division is between twoschools: The status quoists who at best support very incremental and minorchanges to existing service recruitment for several reasons as we will seebelow and reformers who want an institutionally conservative IA to changeby transforming its military capacities at the level of technology,command, organisation, and doctrine, especially in the face of the PRC’sand Pakistan’s evolving capabilities.
*The IA consumes a significant part of its allocated budget leaving littlefor capital expenditure or money for new weapons and platforms impactingthe equipment modernisation of the service.*
Let us begin with the status quoists and the subsequent analysis will takea more critical view of the latter, albeit with some qualifications. Thefirst amongst several objections advanced by a former army officer is thata three-year ToD will lead to decommissioned personnel to take up armsbecause they would be unemployed following their brief ToD, particularlyinto police forces and corporate security. He observedlink, “Do you really wantto put so many people who are well trained in arms to look for jobs wherelevels are already so high? Do you want these ex-soldiers serving in thepolice and or as security guards? My fear is you might end up creatingmilitias of unemployed arms trained men.” This claim received at leasttacit endorsement link from aformer Short Service Officer (SSC) and an infantry officer who completedthe formerly six-year stint. Currently, the minimum SSC tenure is 10 yearslink.The latest three-year ToD proposal is only confined to Non-Commissionedofficers (NCOs) or Jawans and not to officers. Elaborating further, thestatus quoists claim the most “radical” or the most dangerous element inthe GoI’s ToD proposal is the government’s decision to pursue all-Indiarecruitment which would undermine the IA’s corporate or group identitypremised on *“naam, namak aur nishaan”*.linkSomehowthe service’s *esprit de corps* is likely to weaken if recruitment is notderived from specific communities and sub-castes with a martial historysuch as the Rajputs, the Sikhs (Jats, Mazhabis, and Ramdasias), Gurkhas(who are Nepali), Dogras, Jats, Ahirs, Kumaonis, Garwhalis, and Marathas.This objection is quaint and ironic, because the status quoists whootherwise value India’s diversity and pluralism, want narrow sub-caste oralso known as “class-based” recruitment to persist until and unless asea-change comes about in the way the IA recruits. The reason for the largerecruitment from the “martial” classes was due to British colonisationlinkofthe subcontinent and post-independence India persisted with the practice,notwithstanding the Nehruvian ideal of ensuring that recruitment andservice in the IA should reflect the diversity of India, principallybecause of India’s defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962. The urgencyimposed by that defeat meant that the IA’s recruiters went back to the samesources of recruitment that the British pursued in a quest to redress theshortfalls in the IA’s strength. Class-based recruitment helped preserveunit cohesion, morale, and combat effectiveness. The reality today isvastly different from what prevailed in the aftermath of the 1962 war. TheIA has to tap into a wider or hitherto untapped sources of militarymanpower. Indeed, the status quoists do concedelinkthatthere is a need to transcend class-based recruitment. It is equallyunreasonable to persist with “class-based” recruitment purely from a moralstandpoint because India as a society cannot perpetually expect specificcommunities regardless of their martial ethos and commendable historicalrole in bearing the disproportionate burden of India’s defence. Thus,widening the sources of recruitment should be a priority for the Indiangovernment.
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*Elaborating further, the status quoists claim the most “radical” or themost dangerous element in the GoI’s ToD proposal is the government’sdecision to pursue all-India recruitment which would undermine the IA’scorporate or group identity premised on “naam, namak aur nishaan”.*
Further, the status quoist critique of the government’s exploratoryproposal obviously does not offer any concrete evidence of violence beingtriggered by either SSC officers or Jawans who left the IA in past years,especially post-independence or even over the last three decades, whichshould be the real metric for assessing whether there is a strongcorrelation between ex-servicemen recruited into the CAPFs. For instance,have IA officers completing the erstwhile six years of service taken toviolence following their exit from the IA? How many formerlyNon-Commissioned (NCOs) personnel (Jawans) have triggered violencefollowing their entry into state police forces, sowed social unrest, orformed militias? Establishing the veracity of this is not possible, becauseneither the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA), the Ministry of Defence (MoD)nor the Army Headquarters (HQ) recently or in years past have provided anyevidence of violence triggered by decommissioned army personnel. Usingevidence of past violence can also be misleading. For instance, the statusquoists claim that the ToD would unleash a devastating wave of majoritarianviolence because at the time of partition several of the districts whichwere struck by intense inter-communal violence were significantly, althoughnot exclusively precipitated by military veterans who fought in the SecondWorld War. However, lest we forget, this violence was also a directconsequence of the demobilisation of soldiers following the end of theSecond World War. The status quoist’ dire prognostication about the ToDtriggering similar violence to that which accompanied the partition of thesubcontinent is a surprising and misleading analogy derived from twotectonic events that happened on the close heels of each other. It isfundamentally atemporal because today’s realities are vastly different fromwhat happened and prevailed 75 years ago. Extrapolating lessons from a veryunique set of historical events dating back decades and deriving a minatoryinference from those events over the government’s ToD proposal is not justinapt, but reflects how unhinged the status quoist case has become overwhat is still an exploratory proposal. If there is any merit at all in thestatus quoist claim, it is that the IA prepares a template and ethos forrecruiting youth into the service from across India that moves beyondappeals to sub-caste and martial traditions of a particular community.However, if there is any better time to start that process—it is now.
