Security Wise

             [Army training Agniveers]

As a labour-intensive force dealing with disputed borders in Jammu & Kashmir with Pakistan and the fungible Line of Actual Control in the Himalayan Range with China, the Indian Army has always been saddled with an unmanageable problem: How to have a substantial battle-ready force able to hold ground on two fronts and, at the same time, to curtail the mounting manpower-related payroll and pension expenses to ensure the latter does not crowd out the allocations for the former. This is, of course, as much an army problem as a Government of India problem and, in the larger context, a burning political issue.

It became a political issue once the political classes perceived the army as employment generator rather than seeing the Service as having a singular function — national defence. Once that line was breached, the follow-on troubles followed in its wake. Soon enough because of grassroots pressure for longer term, pensionable, army jobs the seven year colour service for the average jawan got extended to 15 years of active duty with a cushion of pension to fall back on at the end of it. The great thing about the original 7-year colour service was that the army boasted of young fighting men in the ranks who were fit and eager for use in aggressive actions. After all, the younger the jawans the more they’d be infused with the natural bellicosity of youth, which properly channeled with tough training, could transform collectively into formidable fighting units.

Once the service tenure got stretched to 15 years, however, the troopers aged and their fighting edge got blunted, and the army had to make-do with what they had. Except, the pension bill to the exchequer became a growing concern, and one can readily see why. Once a jawan is demobilised after 15 years of service, at 35 years of age or younger, he can look forward to the second half of his life on army pension indexed to the inflation rate, enjoying perpetual access for himself and family to good quality health care and to the canteen stores for everyday consumer items, including a ration of liqour, at wholesale rates. It is a financial drain on resources the country simply cannot afford. And because, wars have become rarer — even if death in military action has not, given the many insurgencies the army over the years has been called upon to put down in the northeast and in J&K. Still, an army career in the ranks became an attractive proposition for a goodly portion of the youth population in various parts of the country that were traditionally catchment areas for single-class regiments founded on the farcical notion of “martial races” the British sedulously promoted, but also in the rest of the country.

But single class units relied on a certain cultural homogeneity to bond members of a fighting unit together and to create the esprit de corps that, frankly, was a wonder for many advanced militaries of the world. On more than one occasion, I recall US military officers ruing the fact their army lacked such spirit, or could muster the elan that is a natural attribute of Indian Army regiments. I mean, a battalion of Virginia Volunteers does not exactly have the same ring or promise the fortitude in battle of a 3 Jat, 2 Maratha Light Infantry, Madras Regiment, 2 Kumaon, 1st Gurkhas, or any of a host of other storied units of the Indian Army. It is precisely this socio-cultural cohesion invaluable in operations that the Agniveer programme is blowing up with the Indian army becoming classless. Such, in any case, is the lament of the old timers. 

Agniveers do solve the growing problem of the galloping spend on pensions. But they are not the solution of a return to the 7-year colour service norm. In Bipin Rawat’s time as army chief and then as first chief of the defence staff (CDS), it resulted in an unsatisfactory compromise that tried also to cling to the nativist tilt in the thinking of the Bharatiya Janata Party government of India as a martial nation. Commentators have noted that the Agniveer programme was, as Rawat had conceived it, only a pilot project to test the waters and to see if shorter active service norm could be reintroduced. But, as General MM Naravane, Rawat’s successor, reportedly claims in his memoirs, it was imposed on the three armed services by government fiat with no room for discussion or dissent by the services chiefs of the day. It is clear Naravane was unenthusiastic about the Agniveer concept but it isn’t clear he forsesaw the fatal problems now becoming evident, problems that because of the nature of the other two services, are less severe for the air force and navy.

The second batch of Agniveers has recently joined forward units without the army having the time to weigh the experience gained from their first year in service, and permitting it to tweak the programme accordingly. This did not happen. From its initiation, commanders in the field have been mindful of the political sensitivities attending on putting these short-termers in harm’s way — the fallout from the death of the first Agniveer in action with a Rashtriya Rifles unit in J&K in late October this year was salutary for Modi & his PMO, who had fast-tracked the Agniveer programme in the face of the army’s advising caution. The corrective measure the army adopted — with prompting from PMO — was to avoid further casualties in Agniveer ranks at all cost by tasking them with soft, time pass, missions — guarding depots, etc. in the rear areas. If the Modi government does not back down from its commitment and the Agniveers actually become the sole recruitment source, the endstate for the army will be the progressive thinning of a well trained bulk soldiery until it becomes incapable of undertaking any military action against China (and Pakistan), or even fighting insurgents. An army populated solely by Agniveers will then be good enough only to march down Rajpath in Republic day parades.

In other words, the Agniveer programme promises a younger force all right. But the army will soon find itself toothless — unable aggressively to field its all-Agniveer units. This will be its deathknell as a fighting force. From what I am given to understand, the army has decided to throttle back stealthily on the whole programme as prelude to — the political situation permitting — ending it altogether, but how it is going to achieve this with the Modi regime at the wheel, is unclear. With two years of the Agniveer experience, the army would prefer, it’d seem, a large pensions bill to a ceremonial force of mollycoddled short-termers.

The cruelest cut of the Agniveer programme is this: the Tenth Finance Commisssion in 1995 first proposed (incidentally in my report as adviser, defence expenditure, to the Commission), and accepted in toto by the Narasimha Rao government, that armymen retiring after 15 years colour service be the sole source of recruitment for all the paramilitaries – the Central Reserve Police Force, National Security Guard, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, Industrial Security Force, and the rest of that wasteful and ineffective caboodle. The army veterans channeled into these organisations would sharpen the operational quality of these outfits, require minimal re-training to enable them to operate in civilian settings, and result in huge savings with the dismantling of elaborate and expensive training establishments of the paramils, with each trying to emulate army training infrastructure and procedures of the army but because officered by the Indian Police Service members, ending up being neither fish nor fowl kind of agencies.

The army as source of trained manpower for paramils would have rationalised human resources usage, and greatly reduced the army’s pension payouts by deferring them by some 25 years. It would have also annually made more capital available to the three armed services for modernisation and to fill the “voids” in the war wastage reserve and the war stock whose depleted condition have long prevented the Indian military from fighting long duration wars to a conclusion.

This recommendation was never implemented because the Home Ministry then and since did not want to surrender any control over its in-house armed forces by ceding the recruitment turf to the army. But with Modi intent on making the Agniveer programme a success, his chief lieutenant, Home Minister Amit Shah, has jumped on the PM’s bandwagon. The Agniveers will thus be rewarded for their painless army service with cushy lifelong careers in the paramils! This even as army jawans after 15 years’ hard service and, age wise, still in their prime will continue to be forced into the pension mode!

          [the British Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas]

Talk of the 1st Regiment of the Gurkhas (Malaun)! From what a former Gurkha officer, retired Major General Ashok Mehta, has revealed, the Indian government is considering ending the hoary scheme of recruiting by the Indian Army of Gurkhas from mostly the Pokhara region of Nepal, with the strategic-minded Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who else!, likely picking up the slack, and replacing India as prime recruiter!

A more ridiculously shortsighted self-goal decision by the Indian government is hard to imagine. But trust our leaders to dig holes for the country to fall into! This has happened so often in the past, the surprise is that this decision, if true, is not a surprise!

The Gurkhas carved out a unique military reputation for themselves as doughty fighters and fearsome khukri-wielders, first by fighting the British (Anglo-Nepalese War, 1814-1816), winning their respect, and then fighting for them as the vanguard in many wars of the empire, including subdueing the 1857 “Mutiny”. The image of the Gurkha was so pumped up by then that on many occasions, such as in the trench warfare of World War One, a lot of Germans unwilling to experience the business end of a khukri surrendered once they espied Gurkhas closing in with their “Ayo Gorkahli” war cry. A long line of British commanders attested to the Gurkhas’ fighting prowess, includng the greatest Allied field commander of the Second World War — William Slim heading XIV Army in Burma, who fought alongside the 1/6 Gurkhas in the Gallipolli campaign (1915), and was so impressed he sought transfer from a Warwickshire regiment he was a subaltern in to the Gurkhas and the Indian Army.

Since 1947 per a tripartite arrangement, Nepali Gurkhas have served in the Indian Army (current strength — 42,000) and in the Brigade of Gurkhas (strength: 4,000) of the British Army for ongoing deployments in Asia — in Brunei, Singapore and until 1999, in Hong Kong, and with a Gurkha unit in the lead in the 1982 Falklands War.

The short point: Gurkhas are the most heralded readily marketable bunch of mercenaries that Nepal has long cashed in on. Given an opportunity, every country would want to hire them to fight its wars.  

In Nepal, according to the latest available statistics, in 2020  20.93% of its male population was in the youth bracket of 15-24 years of age, military service age. Or 3,276,431 young men in all. (Index Mundi, https://www.indexmundi.com/nepal/age_structure.html#google_vignette ). It is a country with little else by way of job creation assets. There’s no industry to speak of, and the small mountainside and valley plots can barely sustain subsistence agriculture. The youth roughly constitutes the labour market and prime source of income and remittance revenue for that country. Most Nepali youth choose to find livelihood across the unpoliced order in India — something they are legally allowed to do. The annual intake of Gurkha youth in the Indian and British armies ameliorated the problem somewhat. In mid-2023, the pensions-remittances from Nepali Gurkhas in Indian Army amounted to some 4.5 billion Nepali rupees — a substantial sum in the Nepalese context. But with the Indian Army potentially out of bounds, the Gurkhas, will happily find military employment elsewhere. The Australian army, for instance, is contemplating a Gurkha unit along the British lines. But the real danger is from China.

At the core, the cosy mutually beneficial order of Nepali Gurkhas in the Indian Army is being disrupted by — you guessed it — the Agniveer programme of the Indian Army! Prachanda, the head Communist in Nepali politics, is ideologically driven to get Nepal to siddle upto China under the rubric of “parity”, but is prevented from doing so by the people’s sentiment for India. But he has offered China the service of Gurkhas in PLA! Who is to say Beijing won’t capitalise on the situation New Delhi has deliberately seeded for itself?

Consider what will happen should the Gurkhas enter PLA in sizeable numbers. Nepal will gain from remittances and pensions, of course. But Indian formations on the LAC may have to deal with PLA Gurkha troops! If that isn’t a mind bender, large numbers of Gurkhas processed over time through service with PLA will likely congeal into a vested anti-India front in Nepal and veer the country more and more China-ward. Further, Nepalese as Chinese hire could cross over freely into India and embed themselves in the societies of Indian border states. Acting as subversive element, they could roil the already volatile politics of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It is not hard to speculate how these in-India Gurkhas in Chinese pay could create cyber mayhem for starters, pose a real military danger by being spotters of Indian targets, for instance, for long-range Chinese guided munitions fired from Chinese aircraft, and for Chinese missiles, and even battlefield tactical weapons, and emerge as a joint internal and external security threat.

Such scenarios can get hair-raising, but is not something that apparently concerns the Modi regime. But then geostrategic catastrophes often happen unannounced, but not this time! And the combination of the Agniveer-populated Indian army and Gurkhas forced into PLA is a humdinger!