Why India never saw a military dictatorship
by Anwar Alikhan
A true story: In 1957, the then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, visiting the office of general Thimayya, the chief of the Army
staff, saw a steel cabinet behind his desk, and asked the general what
it contained.
The general replied that the top drawer contained the nation's
defence plans. And the second drawer contained the confidential files of
the nation's top generals.
And what about the third drawer, enquired Nehru.
Ah, said the general with a straight face, the third drawer contains
my secret plans for a military coup against you.
Nehru laughed, but there was apparently a tinge of nervousness to his
laughter.
Military dictatorships have been a common phenomenon in the
post-colonial states of Asia and Africa, and in the 1950s and 1960s, a
dictatorship in India was not an impossibility.
In fact, while covering the 1967 general elections, The Times
correspondent, Neville Maxwell, prophesied that these might well be the
last elections ever in the country. And he was not the only one who
believed that sooner or later, India would fall under military rule.
But that eventuality, of course, never happened.
Why not?
The question why the Indian Army never attempted to seize power has
sometimes been attributed to the fact that it is disciplined, highly
professional, and steeped in proud 250-year-old traditions inherited
from the British. But this theory doesn't work, because the Pakistani
Army was born out of the same traditions and that didn't seem to stop it
from assuming power.
Indeed, one could argue that it was precisely because the Pakistan
Army was such a highly professional force that there came a time when it
felt it could no longer stand by and watch the country slide into chaos,
and felt it was its duty to step in.
Military dictatorships have been a common phenomenon in the
post-colonial states of Asia and Africa. So clearly this is a question
one needs to look at more closely. Which is what political scientist
Steven Wilkinson has done with his excellent new book, Army and Nation.
Interesting pre-history
In order to understand what didn't happen in India, it is perhaps
useful to first look at what did happen in Pakistan. The military
dictatorship in Pakistan has had an interesting pre-history. It begins
in undivided India, where the largest single component of the army was
drawn from the undivided Punjab. Hence at the time of Partition, of all
the institutions that Pakistan inherited, the most substantive was its
army.
Moreover, while in India the Congress Party was a highly evolved,
durable organization, in Pakistan the Muslim League was not the same.
Hence, there was a dangerous structural imbalance in Pakistan,
especially after Jinnah's death in 1948.
The military dictatorship in Pakistan did not come out of the blue.
In the early 1950s, for example, there were riots in Lahore that raged
on because the civilian authorities were unable to control them. Finally
the army was called out, and it swiftly and firmly put down the trouble.
Then the commanding officer made an unusual request: He asked for
another couple of days before withdrawing his troops to the barracks. In
those few, quick days, the army proceeded to clean up the city, paint
public buildings, repair roads, pull down unauthorized structures and
plant trees. Then, having performed all these long neglected civic
tasks, the army quietly withdrew, leaving Lahore looking as clean and
well-ordered as an army cantonment.
This earned the army a great deal of respect among the public: It had
managed to do for the city in a few days what the civilian authority had
failed to do over the years.
Hence, when in 1958, the governor-general of Pakistan responded to a
state of political chaos in the country by declaring martial law, and
calling out the army, there was a section of the public that rejoiced at
the news. In fact, a saying that went around at the time was, "Pakistan
mein ab toh mashallah ho gaya" playing on the term "martial law, and
translating, roughly, as By the grace of God, things in Pakistan are
well now.
What followed over the next few years was a period of remarkable
national development in Pakistan, under the presidency of General Ayub
Khan "before the military government began to get corrupted by its own
power (as always, inevitably, happens in such a system).
Ring-fencing the Indian Army
The Indian Army was born out of the same tradition as Pakistan's.
In British India, the army enjoyed a prominent position in Indian
life, and even played a role in policy matters. The commander-in-chief,
was also the de facto defence minister, and was the second most powerful
person in the hierarchy after the viceroy himself. But after
Independence things began to change. The Indian Army was born out of the
same tradition as Pakistan's.
Prime Minister Nehru believed that the new India needed to rethink
the role of the army, and initiated a policy that would firmly
subordinate it to the civilian authority.
One of the first things that happened after Independence, for
example, was that Teen Murti House, traditionally the grand residence of
the army chief, was assigned instead to the prime minister: A small
matter by itself, perhaps, but a clear indicator of the way the wind was
blowing.
Next came a series of budget cuts (resulting, among other things, in
hefty cuts in army officers' generous Raj-era salaries). And when
India's first army chief, Field Marshal Cariappa, publicly criticised
the government's economic performance, he was immediately rapped on the
knuckles, and told not to meddle in matters that did not concern him.
Over the years a systematic program was pursued to ring-fence the
Indian Armed Forces, and their influence in Indian society, a program
that was given fresh urgency in 1958 by the military coup in next-door
Pakistan (an occurrence that was worryingly praised by Field Marshal
Cariappa, who had recently retired as army chief).
A highlight or, rather, lowlight of that ring-fencing program was the
appointment of Krishna Menon, a powerful, abrasive, leftist
intellectual, as defence minister. It was an attempt to put the armed
forces unambiguously in their place. Unfortunately, it also had the
unintended side effect of leading to the stinging defeat of 1962, but
that is a different story.
Unrecognized achievement
By the 1970s, the Indian armed forces had finally been rendered
'coup-proof' (tm) by a comprehensive system of checks and balances that
had been put in place. And that might be considered to be one of the
major achievements of the Nehru era: Ensuring the durability of Indian
democracy.
It's an achievement that is not sufficiently recognised; an
achievement underscored by the fact that all our South Asian neighbours,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka have experienced military
coups, actual or attempted.
Wilkinson explains how this 'coup-proofing' was implemented, through
a package of carefully thought-out measures, ranging from diversifying
the ethnic composition of the armed forces to setting up rugged command
and control structures, re-casting the order of precedence between civil
and military authorities, paying close attention to promotions,
disallowing army officers from making public statements, creating a
counter-balancing paramilitary force, and topping off this entire effort
with little touches like ensuring that retired chiefs of staff are
usually sent off as ambassadors to faraway countries.
The end result of all this is that when, in 2012, newspapers
breathlessly reported that there had been a coup attempt, with army
units being surreptitiously moved towards Delhi in the wake of the
general V. K. Singh affair, people like you and I, merely shrugged,
said, 'What nonsense', and turned to the sports page.
We perhaps don't realize what a luxury that kind of certainty that
is. -Scroll.in |