At the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, India’s chief of defense staff, Anil Chauhan, made comments that have drawn rebuke within segments of the Indian media. Much of the criticism against Chauhan focused on his admission that India lost some aircraft in its military clash with Pakistan last month, keeping the exact number vague. Some commentators argued that he should not have made this admission on foreign soil.
But few, if any, critics have highlighted a potentially more troubling issue: Why did Chauhan have to make this admission when Indian civilian authorities, especially Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, have not commented on the efficacy (or lack thereof) of India’s military operations?
Civilian authorities in India have maintained a deafening silence about the loss of military aircraft in the recent skirmish, instead leaving senior military officers to discuss the issue in press briefings and interviews.
For all the shortcomings of India’s democracy, its political leadership has long ensured that the military stays in its barracks and responds to civilian authority, unlike in most postcolonial states. But does the failure of India’s civilian leadership to take the lead in discussing the political and military strategy underlying its retaliatory response to the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in April bode ill for the country’s civil-military relations?
This question might sound alarmist, but in the context of other developments, there are some grounds for concern.
Historical background is necessary to understand the pattern of civil-military relations in India, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. In his 1971 book, The Indian Army, esteemed scholar Stephen P. Cohen recounted that, early in his tenure, Nehru reportedly censured some senior Army officers who had come to him pleading for greater resources.
Nehru scolded them for seeking additional funds at a time when India was facing significant food scarcity; the officers acquiesced to the prime minister. This dynamic would persist until the underequipped military faced a debacle in the Himalayas, when China launched a major assault against India in October 1962.
As Cohen writes, prior to India’s independence in 1947, Nehru, then a prominent leader of the Indian National Congress, defended the officers and soldiers of the Indian National Army—which was composed of defectors from the British Indian Army, who had fought alongside the Japanese—when they faced courts-martial at the end of World War II. Relying on nascent international law, Nehru argued that the soldiers had justly fought for their freedom from a colonial power. However, after they were acquitted, he dismissed every one of them.
In Nehru’s view, though the soldiers had the right to oppose a colonial oppressor, they had still broken the sacred oath of office. As a result, they could sow political discord if they reintegrated into the postcolonial Indian Army.
These episodes underscore how in the early days of the Indian republic, Nehru ensured firm civilian control over the military. Establishing these norms was critical for the newly independent India. Nehru’s conviction about this issue, established in declassified documents, was reinforced after Pakistan’s first military coup in 1958. Former Indian Army chief K.M. Cariappa praised the coup, and Nehru lost no time in upbraiding him for the remarks.
Furthermore, when Indian democracy faced significant challenges—especially under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, who briefly suspended civil liberties in the late 1970s—the Indian military played no role in enabling political repression.
In the early 1990s, when India faced a spate of political disturbances including a growing insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, Indian Army chief Sunith Francis Rodrigues made an off-the-cuff remark about the military’s role in “good governance.” This seemingly offhand statement caused a political uproar, and he was forced to publicly apologize to Parliament.
Since then, the military has only managed to stymie the preferences of both civil society and civilian authority on a handful of occasions. One of them involved the fraught issue of the Siachen Glacier in disputed Kashmir. Diplomatic efforts to reach an accord with Pakistan on the demilitarization of the glacier apparently nearly succeeded in 1992. However, the Indian military’s top brass prevailed upon political authorities not to give ground; the deal was scuttled.
It is also well known that the Indian military’s staunch opposition to the repeal of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act—which grants the military sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and the use of force with near-impunity—has ensured that no government will terminate the legislation despite widespread misgivings about it among civil society.
The question of civilian control over the military in India may now be coming to the fore again. Obviously, India faces no imminent threat of a coup from its military—unlike in Pakistan, where the armed forces are all-powerful. Nevertheless, sounding the alarm about the dilution of civilian authority over the military in India is not scaremongering.
Some developments in civil-military relations, even prior to the Pahalgam crisis, might indicate an erosion of norms for civil-military relations in a democracy. In 2018, Indian Army chief Bipin Rawat singled out a regional political party in India’s northeast as benefiting from the flight of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar to India via Bangladesh. Opposition political parties correctly highlighted that it was inapt for the Army chief to make such comments.
The Indian government, however, did not ask Rawat to withdraw his comments, let alone censure him for clearly controversial remarks that strayed into the political thicket. In fact, the next year, Rawat was appointed as the first chief of defense staff—a position designed to coordinate the operations of all three military branches.
A more recent episode also raises questions about civil-military norms in India. At a biennial air show in Bengaluru in February, Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh raised some legitimate questions about the ability of the state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) to deliver light combat aircraft in a timely fashion to the Indian Air Force. It is no secret that HAL’s performance has been below par for decades—or that the Air Force is woefully short of its sanctioned strength.
However, that Singh aired these sentiments within earshot of reporters at an international air show is disturbing. Whether or not the Indian government had cleared the remarks remains an open question, and New Delhi has remained quiet about the matter. Singh, for his part, has said a private conversation in which he sought to highlight HAL’s delays was inappropriately made public.
Whatever the particulars of the incident, it suggests that civilian authorities in India are apparently either unable or unwilling to assert themselves on critical matters of national security. It is of course possible that the episodes recounted here are merely random events and do not reflect an emergent pattern. However, they could be emblematic of institutional dysfunction in civil-military relations or at least a misalignment of views on crucial national security issues.
These concerns assume greater significance given the uncertain performance of the Indian Air Force in the aftermath of the recent military skirmish. In India’s last major conflict with Pakistan, the 1999 Kargil War, the higher-level direction of war and proper civil-military coordination enabled India to achieve a decisive victory after some initial stumbles. The Army and the Air Force were at first not in accord, but a meeting of the civilian Cabinet Committee on Security ensured appropriate coordination, culminating in India’s success.
If certain institutional pathologies in civil-military relations have crept in since then, they could have adverse consequences for India’s ability to formulate and implement a coherent defense strategy against its long-standing adversaries: Pakistan, as well as China.