Cover Story: Indian Army's Changing Face

Middle-class officers, more educated soldiers and women are changing the face of the army which is confronted by tough professional challenges. But a relative decline in wages and social status are hurting the army's self-esteem and could affect its performance.

The son of a Mumbai taxi driver, a silver medallist at the Indian Military Academy (IMA), Dehradun? The barman at the parachute regiment mess, father of an officer in the very same regiment? Women officers? "Wait a minute!" a retired Pune colonel may splutter, "What is the army coming to?" But without the fanfare or turmoil that has marked similar changes in other areas of the country's life, the 11 lakh-strong Indian Army is undergoing a social alteration. While its soldiers are more educated -- matriculation being the minimum qualification for recruitment since 1980 -- its officer class is being fed more and more by the offspring of achievement-oriented lower middle-class families. As in times of old, it is also becoming a class apart with an increasing proportion of new entrants (see chart) being sons of army men. Yet, in many ways it is also becoming a technically proficient and self-confident army. But not all is well. Declining pay levels and status of the officer class have led to a lowered sense of self-esteem manifested by the uncomfortably large number of mid-career officers seeking to leave the army.

Old-timers like Lt-General (retd) K.K. Hazari, former vice-chief of the army, believes that the changed profile of the officer class has diluted the standards and that officers should be recruited from the "old" middle class that possesses "certain ethical, social and moral values". In a recent article, Major-General (retd) Ashok Mehta stirred a hornets' nest when he declared that "sons of truck drivers, general merchants and professional wrestlers" had replaced the "traditional" classes and turned the armed forces into a "second class profession".

But Lt-General Inder Verma, director general military operations at the Army Headquarters,vehementaly disagrees. Wounded in Kashmir, Verma was till 1996 commandant of the IMA. "Anyone who says he was a better officer at the same age as the young officer of today is a liar," he flatly asserts, pointing to the almost continuous cycle of study and professional courses that officers and men have to pursue today, compared to the laid back atmosphere of the army till the disastrous 1962 border war with China. Lt-General R.K. Sawhney, the army's intelligence chief who once commanded a corps in the North-east, maintains that the army training system was enough to "put the polish" on a young man of any background to become "an officer and gentleman".

This shift in the social background, begun by the post-Independence decision to make the army an egalitarian "career open to talents", is already reflected in the composition of the army's top leadership. As many as 10 of the top 18 generals who command the army today come from "lower middle-class" backgrounds. At least four of them, including Chief of Army Staff V.P. Malik and Vice-Chief Chandrashekhar, are sons of men who entered the army through the junior-commissioned officer stream. The fathers of five others are from the civilian clerical grade.

Dominated till the '70s by an old-fashioned Anglophile elite, the army's officers are today solidly middle class, leaning towards the lower-middle strata. The changed milieu is partly reflected in the nicknames. Malik is simply "Ved", even the dashing K. Sundarji was just "Sundar". Post-Independence army chiefs were "Kipper" (Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa) or "Timmy" (General K.S. Thimayya). Maharaj Rajendra- sinhji, who succeeded Cariappa as the army chief, had a royal background. Thimayya and Cariappa came from westernised Coorg families, in many ways more British than the British themselves. The third chief General S.M. Shrinagesh's father S. Mallanah was the personal physician to the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Since the '80s there have been no chiefs from such backgrounds. Sundarji's father was an inspector of schools, B.C. Joshi's father was an assistant labour commissioner and Shankar Roy Chowdhury's father was an officer with the Imperial Bank of India.. "We are now the commoners' Army," says Lt-general J.S. Dhillon, master general ordnance and erstwhile commander of the 15 Corps in Srinagar. "Moderation in drinking is in, club life, polo and partridge shoots are out." He adds half mockingly: "The elite are sending their children abroad."

Lieutenants A.K. Thakur and Ruchi Sharma are two new faces of this modern army's officer corps. He is the son of a warrant officer, a junior-commissioned category in the Indian Air Force (IAF), who echoes the middle-class credo when he says: "Like every father, mine is proud of the fact that his son has done better than he could in life." Ruchi Sharma, one of the 350 women who have literally changed the face of the Indian Army, is the daughter of an army officer who passed out from the same Officers' Training Academy in Chennai that his daughter did. With her maroon beret at a rakish angle, she proudly notes that she is a "professional paratrooper" not a recreational one.

For Thakur and Sharma life will not be easy. The increasingly technology-intensive army demands ever higher levels of technical competence. The steep promotion pyramid makes the competition to get ahead intense. Better educated soldiers demand a much more sophisticated approach to leadership than was needed with the village boys of the past.

Getting enough officers of this calibre is becoming more difficult because the army's wages and status have declined relative to the other civil services. It is no secret that since the '70s officers recruited after their graduation directly through the IMA have, in several instances, been of the "lowest acceptable grade". Even then, in the '90s the army has accumulated a shortage of 13,000 or so officers. In a recent book, Harvard scholar Stephen P. Rosen concludes that this is because "the relative material incentives to become an officer have declined". Total benefits for a company commander (usually of the rank of major) decreased 60 per cent in the 1947-82 period; for battalion commanders (lt-colonel), the decline was sharper -- about 70 per cent. Compounding this are risk-related disincentives, such as the Sri Lanka venture, Siachen, Kashmir and insurgencies in the North-east that have led to the death of thousands of soldiers. While in the '50s and '60s there was a comfortable mix of field and peace-station life, today things are uniformly tough. How difficult it is can be seen from the careers of a colonel of the infantry and his wife who is a Class I civil servant in an all-India service. After both began their respective careers in 1972, the colonel has spent a little over half his 26 years of service in field and operational deployments like on the Indo-Tibet border, Siachen, the Kashmir Valley (two tenures) and Nagaland. The wife shuttled between Meerut, Chandigarh and Delhi. Since 1991, she has held a joint secretary's rank, something which her colonel husband will get only if he reaches the rank of major-general after another five years. Compared to 0.5 per cent of army officers who reach this rank, 17 per cent of those who join the IAS become joint secretaries.

The Fourth Pay Commission improved things, but the Fifth Pay Commission that lavished all the benefits on the IAS has caused a near mutiny in the Indian Air Force and great discontent in the army. One manifestation of this has been the growth in number of premature retirements. Last year, as soon as the contents of the report became public, there was a spurt of requests. As compared to 258 officers in 1995 and 285 in 1996, as many as 435 officers left the service in 1997. Of these, 304 were colonels. Says Colonel (retd) Vijay Chaddha who put in his papers in 1992 at the age of 40: "Stagnation in the service, downgrading of our status and better opportunities beckoning prompted my move." Chaddha was a high-profile officer who held, just before quitting, a prized appointment in the Military Operations Directorate at the Army Headquarters in Delhi. He now works for a well-known air freight company which employs two other colonels who left the service around the same time. Ironically, it was his last posting that made up his mind for him: "It was there that the difference in status between the civilian Ministry of Defence officers and the army hit me."

The army has been kept separate from society to enhance its efficiency. For this, the officers were, at least till the '60s, compensated with reasonable wages, and, more important, had izzat (honour) and elevated social standing. Countries around the world work out ways to give their armies a special status. In India, however, a wall seems to have emerged between the army and the bureaucratic-political elites whose children are no longer joining the army (see chart) and whose daughters, it is widely believed, no longer prefer grooms from the armed forces. The changing face of the army today may reflect broader social trends in the country, but its lowered self-esteem and status have profound negative implications, the least of which is its ability to safeguard the country's security.

INDIAN ARMY: FROM SHIVAJI TO DATE
A study in change

Mid-17th Century: Shivaji, without any European guidance, was the first Indian king to try and create a modern army by recruiting people from all social strata, including Dalit Mahars, keeping them in isolated camps and insisting they be paid by a central treasury rather than by zamindars.
1740s-1840s: The Bengal Army was the largest of the British East India Company forces and comprised mainly Hindu highcastes. The Bombay Army, facing hostile Marathas, was more mixed and more "caste-blind", stressing pride in regiment.
1857-1900: After the Great Mutiny of 1857, the army was reorganised to keep out "high-caste troublemakers". Loyalty was a deciding factor, conveniently linked with racial thought in Europe. Preference was shown to northerners like the Punjabi Mussalmans, Sikhs, Dogras, Jats, Rajputs, Pathans, and, of course, Gurkhas. Some Indians, coming from the ranks of the kings and princes owing fealty to the British, got commissioned as officers.
1918-1945: A large number of Indian soldiers participated in both the World Wars. In 1919, King's Commissions were given to a number of Indians, including Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa. In 1922, the Royal Indian Military College was set up in Dehradun to train Indians to go to the military academy at Sandhurst, Britain. General K.S. Thimayya was in its first batch. The first Indian commissioned officers came from the new IMA at Dehradun in 1933, and among its first products was Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw. At the beginning of World War II, there were just 550 Indian officers but by the end of the war, 11,000 officers had been accepted into the army.
1947 and after: The Indian Army is slowly moving away from its colonial heritage. The main catalyst of change was the defeat in the border war of 1962. Competitive examination for recruiting officers and self-conscious efforts to recruit soldiers from across the country have made it less elitist and more representative of the nation.