Why there has never been a military dictatorship in India.pdf

BOOK REVIEW (/TAGS/171/BOOK-REVIEW)

Why there has never been a military dictatorship in IndiaStephen Wilkinson looks at this question in his new book, Army and Nation.

Anvar Alikhan (/authors/1484) Jun 01, 2015 08:30 am

A true story: In 1957, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, visiting the office of General Thimayya, the

Chief of Army Staff, saw a steel cabinet behind his desk, and asked the General what it contained.

Photo Credit: Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod / Wikimedia Commons

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The General replied that the top drawer contained the nations defence plans. And the second drawer

contained the confidential files of the nations 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 a disciplined, highly professional army, steeped in proud 250-year old traditions

inherited from the British. But this theory doesnt work, because the Pakistani army was born out of

the same traditions and that didnt 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.

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.

In order to understand what didnt 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 organisation, in Pakistan

the Muslim League was not much more than Jinnah and his Private Secretary. Hence, there was a

dangerous structural imbalance in Pakistan, especially after Jinnahs death in 1948.

Mashallah ho gaya

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 unauthorised 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 Pakistans. 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.

Prime Minister Nehru believed that the new India needed to re-think 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 Indias first army chief, Field Marshall Cariappa, publicly

criticised the governments 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 programme was pursued to ring-fence the 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 Marshall Cariappa, who had

recently retired as Army chief). A highlight or, rather, lowlight of that ring-fencing programme 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.

An unrecognised achievement

By the 1970s, the Indian armed forces had finally been rendered coup-proof 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. Its an

achievement that is not sufficiently recognized; 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 para-military 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 dont realise what a luxury that kind of certainty that is.

We welcome your comments at [email protected] (mailto:?Subject=Why%20there%20has%20never%20been%20a%20military%20dictatorship%20in%20India&[email protected])

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Even today most popular anecdotes in Hyderabad credit the haleem or the harissa to the Alamgir,

though history points to the Yemenis in the army of Bahadur Shah, the Sultan of Gujarat in the 16th

century, for first serving it to Hyderabad Nizams. Either way, it was a pure-play soldier dish.

The alchemy started with the slaughter of lambs the skull and breasts were cooked as nihari, while

the meat, mixed with wheat, lentils or cereals and sometimes sweetened with jaggery, was cooked for

eight-odd hours. What magic got produced was eaten together as a community. Already a heavy dish,

it was made richer over time by adding dry fruits and ghee.

Thats the creation we also see today. Unlike today, however, it was not a traditional Ramzan dish.

Camel, emu variants

It was a dish that was consumed during Muharram, said Ashar Farhan, cultural curator of

Lamakaan, whose family has been in Hyderabad for generations. It was a dish created to serve the

energy needs of the soldier-like fiery mourners. It was cooked for hours, often for seven to eight, and

hence the dish took the name of Haleem Persian for patience but close to the Arabic Harissa. Since

it was never a domestic dish, it was cooked for large numbers of people, it was a dish associated with a

special occasion.

It is a tough dish, though a delicacy, Farhan further explained. The richness of the dish and its

appeal lies in it being cooked for hours, and beaten and mashed. It becomes like a rich paste, the spices

and herbs used are thoroughly mixed with the wheat-flour and meat. It takes a tough stomach to

digest it. It was also u ...

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BOOK EXCERPT (/TAGS/1584/BOOK-EXCERPT)

Govind Nihalani, Farah Khan and Santosh Sivan talk abouttheir first filmsIn the book Directors Diaries, three filmmakers retrace the steps they took towards getting

their debut features off the ground.

Rakesh Anand Bakshi (/authors/2152) Today 04:30 pm

Govind Nihalani on Aakrosh

Rakesh Bakshi: Was the story of your first film as director, Aakrosh, inspired from a true story?

Govind Nihalani: The story does not refer to any particular incident as such. It just reflected the state

of socio-political affairs at that time. Vijay Tendulkar, the playwright and film writer, was researching

for a Homi Bhabha Fellowship at the time and his subject was The emerging patterns of violence as

reflected in Indian theatre. One day he narrated an incident to me that had taken place around

Photo Credit: Main Hoon Na/Red Chillies Entertainment

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Bhiwandi, Maharashtra. A man was found dead with an arrow wound; he was an adivasi. Another

adivasi loitering around, or maybe just going about his regular day, was arrested as a suspect. What

happened to this allegedly innocent man, I do not know, but the circumstances of the murder and how

he was arrested impacted me. I felt sad that a poor man, who is uneducated, has no knowledge of the

law, and has no means to access lawyers, has just no hope!

Your films are known for the actors performances. How do you create a good rapport with your

actors? Do you conduct workshops before beginning principal photography?

GN: I love my actors. And every actor is unique and therefore there is no standard method of working

with them. However, in my experience, I have realized that to get the best out of an actor, one thing

that usually works the best for me is to push him or her out of their comfort zone. I try to persuade my

actors to abandon their comfortable way, and attempt the difficult way in. And when they do that, the

results are far more exciting.

For example, Om Puri. I had heard about two student actors, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah, from

Girish Karnad, who had noticed their extraordinary talent while he was the director at FTII [Film and

Television ...

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Why there has never been a military dictatorship in India.pdf

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Transcript of Why there has never been a military dictatorship in India.pdf