Agneepath, a fire that can make India sing

On September 15, 2013, Narendra Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party addressed an ex-servicemen rally in Rewari, Haryana, where he called for ‘One Rank One Pension’ (OROP) for all soldiers. strongly supported. Mr. Modi was then preaching in poetry, and nine years later, as Agneepath scheme for recruitment of short term contract constables was announced, he is forced to contend with the reality of what reigns in prose. No matter how much the government tries to complicate, the driving factor for this U-turn – from ‘One Rank One Pension’ to ‘No Rank No Pension’ – is economics.

financial motivation

The demand for OROP became difficult to meet after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, but it was officially instituted in November 2015 for over 25 lakh defense pensioners. This came with an immediate annual financial implication of ₹ 7,123.38 crore and the actual outstanding from 1 July 2014 to 31 December 2015 was ₹ 10,392.35 crore. The fiscal burden grew cumulatively over time and the budgetary expenditure on defense pensions has increased substantially. In the current fiscal, Rs 1,19,696 crore has been budgeted for pensions, as well as Rs 1,63,453 crore for salaries – which is 54% of the allocation for the Defense Ministry.

It has been argued that the savings in the pension bill – which will appear in the books only after a few decades – will be directed towards modernization of the defense forces. The armed forces do not have much time to postpone their long-delayed modernisation. The money should come now. The Indian Air Force is already down to 30 squadrons of fighter jets as against 42 squadrons, and the Indian Navy is at 130 ships when it had a vision of having a 200-ship navy; The Indian Army is already short of 100,000 soldiers. The announcement of the Agniveer scheme is an implicit acknowledgment that the Indian economy is unable to support the armed forces that India needs. It faces an active military threat from two adversaries, China and Pakistan, and internal security challenges in Kashmir and the northeastern states. These realities cannot be wished for. Instead of expanding the economy to support the military, the government has resorted to shrinking the military.

harmful consequences

Since the short-term recruitment policy has neither been formulated in principle nor tried out as a pilot project, the exact consequences of this move will be known only when they come into play. But it is sure to have an adverse effect on the professional capabilities of the armed forces. It begins with increased turnover of young soldiers, increased training capabilities and infrastructure, and increased administrative arrangements for more recruitment, release and retention of soldiers. Armed forces claiming a poor tooth-to-tail ratio are raising the tail further. The Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy employ their airmen and sailors in very specialized roles that require technical skill and a high level of training and experience. They form the backbone of the system that keeps warships at sea, fighters in the air, and high-tech weapons and platforms operating. Since the short-term contractual soldier model (Agniveer scheme) is going to take a few years to be fully implemented at the organizational level, the actual degradation of operational capability will be known only then.

In the case of the Indian Army, the challenge is twofold. The Indian Army has emerged from a legacy that dates back to 1748. According to a paper by Syed Hussain Shaheed Soharwardy, the emphasis was on discipline and efficiency in the early years, and their isolation from the fragmented Indian society. It transformed Indian soldiers into a professional, cohesive and autonomous fighting force whose loyalty, in the words of Stephen Rosen, was to their ‘homogeneous military units’, for which they rewarded with a secure pay and pension system ‘full-time, served a long period of time. As the homogeneous nature of the Bengal Army was seen as one of the factors contributing to the outbreak of the Revolt of 1857, the British Crown maintained the distinction and segregation of castes and classes in the Indian Army thereafter, as the paper is described in.

Even after independence, class-based recruitment – ​​a euphemism for caste – has defined the nature and character of the Indian Army, shaping its ethos and fighting capabilities. In an affidavit to the court a few years ago, the government had said that the army had “performed very well in recruiting the President’s bodyguards while maintaining the class structure and the change in the pan-India class structure would not only affect the functioning of the PBG, but also affect the functioning of the PBG”. [President’s Bodyguard] for the presidency but will also affect the seniority structure of the regiment”. It defended class-based units, claiming that “after selection, personnel are grouped on the basis of functional requirements for optimum operational effectiveness”.

In the Agneepath proposal, class-based recruitment has been replaced by all-India all-class recruitment. The reasons for this drastic change in government thinking are a mystery but it will strike at the core of the Indian Army’s organizational management, leadership structures and operational philosophy. Even though soldiers in the Indian Army are professionally trained, they draw inspiration from their social identity – which is reflected in whose specialty. take the name of, salty And scar – Where each soldier cares about his reputation among peers in his caste group or his village or his social setting. To replace this would be its challenges in a tradition-bound army with the pure professional identity of a soldier, where units perform their missions as an honor of war in the 18th century. Running a Gorkha regiment with a Jat soldier from Haryana, a Malayali from Kerala and a Meitei from Manipur requires a massive restructuring, for which the Army is currently unprepared. It is driven more by the hope that as an adaptive institution with great resilience, the Army will find a way to somehow deal with this turmoil while protecting its operational capabilities.

There are other challenges thrown by the model. There will be major problems training, integrating and deploying soldiers with varying levels of experience and motivation. The criterion to identify retaining 25% of short-term contracted troops could result in unhealthy competition. An organization that relies on trust, camaraderie and esprit de corps can be marred by rivalry and jealousy between winners and losers, especially in the final year of the contract. Even if the government has put the contract at four years to deny Agniveer gratuity and is not counting the contract period for regular service, these provisions must be challenged legally; And like the OROP issue, there could be a politically attractive demand for longer tenure and pension to be raised by the opposition parties. Over time, this will again increase the salary and pension budget.

political, social implications

The Agneepath scheme also does away with the idea of ​​state-wise quotas for army recruitment based on the recruitable male population of that state, which was implemented from 1966. This prevented an imbalanced army, which was dominated by a single state. Linguistic community or ethnicity, as was the case with the Punjab province of Pakistan. Academic research suggests that high levels of caste imbalance are linked to serious problems of democracy and an increased likelihood of civil war, a worrying scenario for today’s India where federalism is being severely tested by the ideology of the ruling party.

Simultaneously there is a lack of hope in India’s economy, where more than 450 million Indians have stopped looking for jobs, there are high levels of unemployment and under-employment. It is to this mix that these few thousand youths who have been trained to commit organized violence will be thrown out every year. From then Yugoslavia to Rwanda – and closer to home, during the Partition – there are many examples of displaced soldiers due to increased violence against minorities. Today’s India is characterized by weak state capacity, where the state has delegated its exclusive right to violence to the majority groups. It offers an alcoholic cocktail that requires only a spark to consume India.

In India, the Indian Army has so far provided salaries, uniforms and prestige, a legacy of the British, who provided living conditions, facilities for the families of soldiers, and post-retirement benefits and rewards, such as land grants. This meant that military service remained attractive to several generations of the same family, anchoring them in tradition. It also resulted in social prestige and privilege where pension resulted in a comfortable life for the retired soldier. A short term contract soldier, without earning a pension, after his military service will be seen as taking up a job that is not seen to correspond to status and prestige with a profession of honour. This would reduce the motivation of those involved in short-term contracts while undermining the “respect” of a profession that places extraordinary demands on young men. The government’s craving for financial savings runs the risk of undermining the esteem of a profession, the stability of society and the security of the country.

Sushant Singh is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Policy Research