Who's conducting India's wars?

Conventional wisdom suggests leaders must control army generals, but we seem to be doing opposite

When he was assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt learned something important from his boss, the pacifist Josephus Daniels. “While the European nations allowed power to devolve on to the military when once (the First World) War began, leaving their politicians powerless either to overrule the generals or to make peace, Daniels taught FDR the greatest lesson of the twentieth century,” writes Nigel Hamilton in his book American Caesars profiling modern presidents. The lesson was: “Politicians must retain control of the generals, and must use that power wisely.”

French leader Georges Clémenceau said the same thing about war being too important a matter to be left to the military. Did they mean the actual fighting? Of course not. What they meant was the decisions that led to the fighting. Violence is a course of last resort as Carl von Clausewitz tells us. We should fight only when we are convinced we can finish the argument, because the risks and costs to us are high.

Who has the Indian government left war to? The question must be asked because a report says that firing exchanges with Pakistan have escalated since the surgical strike last year. The Indian Express reported there were 124 exchanges of fire along the Line of Control (LoC) and the international border in Jammu. This was up from five in the same period before the surgical strike, according to government data. This part of the border, in Jammu, was not being used for infiltration by Pakistan earlier, but the violence was stemming from soldiers on both sides creeping across and murdering each other in vengeance for acts of beheading and other bestiality. So who is in charge on our side?

Business Standard reported on May 6, that the defence minister has left it to the generals. The headline was: “Indian Army competent to take action on mutilation issue: Jaitley”. The minister was quoted as saying that “like every Indian I have full confidence in the Indian Army. It will take appropriate action. Beyond that we must learn to trust our Indian Army.” More worryingly he added, “what they decide we leave it to them. These are not issues that can be determined in the public domain, Army decides.”

This level of casualness comes out of many things. First that violence with Pakistan has become normalised. We are fine with a few of our soldiers dying in meaningless confrontation every year, so long as a few of theirs are also killed. The second reason this is left to the soldiers is that wider society has no stake in these sacrifices, particularly the Anglicised upper class. This is because our sons are not enlisted as jawans and it is left to other people to die, and to kill. Recruitment has been done in the same manner on the subcontinent for hundreds of years. Gujarat, for example, with five per cent of the population supplies only one per cent of our soldiers. In Pakistan, it is mainly the Jats of the Pothowar plateau have supplied the army, whether British or Pakistani.

How many people do you know who have enlisted in the army? I don’t know many. Our Parliament will also reflect this reality. In the United States, 20 sitting senators and 89 representatives (their Lok Sabha) were veterans. This was 20 per cent of the total. And the survey, by Pew in 2013, was headlined “Most members of Congress have little direct military experience”, meaning that even 20 per cent was a historic low. The high point in recent decades was hit in 1977, when 77 per cent of serving senators and representatives had served in the armed forces.

It would be instructive to see what the number is in India among elected leaders and the media. I mention the latter because the lunatic ranting of our anchors, goading the nation nightly to war, is accompanied with zero experience of actual battle or soldiery. I personally prefer to get my analysis from actual warriors, like this paper’s Ajai Shukla, rather than the studio samurai. This seems perfectly reasonable. But this being India things must get bizarre and they have. Our last defence minister did not leave war to the generals but to anchors, insults and emotion.

Manohar Parrikar this month provided information on the surgical strikes (we still have zero information on what happened and how many were killed, but it was a great victory) across the LoC last year. Speaking to industrialists, who were no doubt interested in this, Mr Parrikar described the sequence. The wire service PTI ran the report of this and issued a correction because what the report revealed was outrageous. What follows is from the corrected version, which remains outrageous. Mr Parrikar said that a strike across the international border in Myanmar happened because of emotion. In his words: “I felt insulted... A small terrorist organisation of 200 people killing 18 Dogra soldiers was an insult to the Indian Army and we sat in the afternoon and sat in the evening and worked out the (plan of) the first surgical strike which was conducted on 8th June morning in which about 70-80 terrorists were killed (along the India-Myanmar border).”

Illustration by Binay Sinha

How did the attack in PoK happen? While Mr Parrikar was watching a TV debate on the Myanmar attack, “… one question hurt me. (Information minister) Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, an ex-armyman, was on TV and he was explaining about all kinds of search operations. An anchor asked him ‘Would you have the courage and capability of doing the same on the western front?’ I listened very intensely but decided to answer when the time came.”

We are putting the lives of Indians at stake through this sort of thinking, in which violence answers hurt and insult. That these words have not terrified more people, or become a story of any consequence says something about our country.

Many of us have felt that often what the Hindutva leaders say, especially their more loopy pronouncements, is for public consumption. What actually happens in government is serious work done by serious and reasonable people. What has been revealed on military violence by this government undermines that optimism substantially. We seem to have reversed the dictum of retaining control over generals, and entirely abandoned thoughts of using that power wisely.