Soldiers, Bureaucrats, and Statesmen: India’s Civil-Military Balance

In the late summer of 2017, the Indian Integrated Defense Staff Headquarters (IDS HQ) published the first-ever Joint Doctrine of the Indian Armed Forces (JDIAF). In the absence of a public national security or defense strategy, this document was widely scrutinized for clues about the overall direction of India’s defense posture. Riddled with elliptical statements, typographical errors, and instances of outright plagiarism, one point stood out as analysts poured over the document: In the section on India’s nuclear doctrine, it omitted the “minimum” in describing India’s nuclear posture which is – officially at least – predicated on credible minimum deterrence.

Coming as it did months after a raging controversy over whether New Delhi was in the process of changing its nuclear-use policy, many interpreted this omission as a policy shift. It was nothing of that sort. Months after the first version of the JDIAF was released, the IDS HQ issued another version that reinstated the missing “minimum.” By then of course, the damage had been done. Pakistan also started describing its nuclear-weapons posture as one of “credible deterrence,” to match India, in effect using the Indian omission as justification for its aggressive nuclear policy for the sake of normative parity.

India’s nuclear weapons policy is something the civilian leadership zealously guards – and the military’s role in determining its trajectory is officially none. Therefore, as a matter of political signalling the very fact that it was reiterated (incorrectly, as it turns out) in a military document was notable. But what was more striking was the fact that the “minimum” gaffe showed that the JDIAF was not subject to civilian review. To wit, had it been so, there is no way the civilian Ministry of Defense (MoD) would have let this slip – with its serious political consequence – pass.

In many ways this lack of coordination between the civilian authorities at MoD and the military planners who wrote the JDIAF is emblematic of the dysfunctional nature of civil-military relations in India. That is the subject of former Indian Army officer and Nanyang Technological University professor Anit Mukherjee’s excellent new book, The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India.

Normal, Unequal, or Absent?

At the heart of the debate around a “correct” model of civil-military relations are two schools of thought. The first one, proposed in 1957 by Samuel Huntington in his classic The Soldier and the State, posits a theory of “objective control” of the military by the civilian leadership, which recognizes the professional knowledge of men and women in uniform and consequentially grants them autonomy in the planning (and eventual prosecution) of wars. This theory became sacrosanct to the point that an alternative theory, proposed by Eliot Cohen (in his 2002 book Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime), referred to it as the “normal theory” of civil-military relations.

In Cohen’s alternative telling, the ideal should be flipped around in the form of an “unequal dialogue” driven by a thrusting read of the Clausewitzian formulation of war – which is “not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse.” Therefore, Cohen argues, the stakes of the civilian political leadership in the planning and prosecution of war is much higher than imagined and demands commensurate control over the military, especially during wartime.

While the title of Mukherjee’s book is a tribute to “unequal dialogue” formulation, the policy prescriptions that emerge out of his study are not as radical as Cohen’s, principally because unlike Cohen Mukherjee’s interest does not lie in inferring the state of Indian civil-military relations by examining combat records (unreliable as they are in the Indian case). Instead he looks at its influence on five dependent variables that determine military effectiveness:  weapons procurement, jointness, professional military education, military promotions, and defense planning.

By clinically examining the influence of civil-military relations in all five of these areas, each being the subject an individual chapter in the book, Mukherjee comes to the conclusion that the relationship between the civilian (both political and bureaucratic) and military side of the equation can be best characterized by an “absent dialogue.”

This absent dialogue is characterized as well as shaped by three persistent features: lack of military expertise among the civilian class and bureaucracy, an “institutional design” (which determines the relative position of India’s armed forces to the MoD) that places the military under stifling bureaucratic control, and persistent Huntingtonian autonomy of the military on matters related to the planning and prosecution of warfare.

To be sure, this effects of each of these three factors on India’s wars have varied over time. For example, scholar after scholar has demonstrated that the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his defense minister, the very mercurial V.K. Krishna Menon, meddled with the Indian Army’s planning during the 1962 war with China, leading to the disastrous outcome that continues to scar India today. The objective control of the Indian military, as conceived of by Huntington and his acolytes, has hardly been axiomatic in independent India’s history.

But often the pendulum has swung too far away from Cohen (had the Nehru-Menon duo succeeded in pushing the PLA back in 1962, one can imagine them becoming a fifth case-study in his book) and toward Huntington in India’s civil-military history. As Mukherjee notes, one of the consequences of India’s defeat in the 1962 war was that when time came three years later to fight Pakistan, the Indian civilian leadership was too afraid to enforce jointness among the three services. As he writes, “[d]uring this war civilians gave the military considerable leeway and autonomy in planning and operations. Civilian principals ... did little to encourage or foster jointness within the services. Instead ... they stayed away from discussing or questioning operational plans.”

The fact that patterns of civil-military relations remained a matter of vacillation, learning, and course-correction from the past became clear in the 1971 war with Pakistan, when the political as well as bureaucratic leadership “played a more active role in facilitating jointness” even though whether they “actively intervened and pushed for joint operations” is not known, to quote Mukherjee.

The Perils of Military Autonomy

A curious India comment whenever things flare up on the India-Pakistan informal border – the Line of Control (LoC) – is that the “military has been given a free hand to deal with the situation” by the civilian leadership. While this posture – of delegating autonomy to the military at a tactical level – could be read as a classic example of how a “normal theory” of civil-military relations should play out, the situation is far from acceptable. In a recent book on India-Pakistan ceasefire violations, Indian scholar Happymon Jacob seeks to find underlying explanations for such instances, which have increased to alarming levels in recent years.

Jacob finds no direct causal link between the ebb and flow of political relations between the two countries and instances of cross-LoC firings. Indeed, he theorizes the existence of “autonomous military factors” as explaining them. This is a fancy way of saying that there appears to be very little political control over such incidents of ceasefire violations instigated by the military on both sides, especially in periods of “political permissibility” where bilateral relations between India and Pakistan are especially tense, such as the period from 2014 to today.

Without commenting on the validity of Jacob’s theory – which is ultimately unsatisfying in that the conjectured autonomous military factors seem to assume salience only in the overarching political context, thereby “shaping” their autonomy – there is no denying that the objective control model of civil-military relations (especially favored by the Indian military, as Mukherjee notes) comes with its own risks in politically charged periods.

At the same time, this declared posture of greater military autonomy during crises seems to a low-cost way for the political class to placate the domestic audience as well as rattle the adversary while reserving the ability to blame the military in case things go south in the process. The absent dialogue between civilians and the military in India can also be seen as comfortable silence, driven by cynicism as well as status-quoism on the part of all stakeholders.

Civil-Military Relations Under Modi

When Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, civil-military relations in the country were in dire straits. Two years before, then-Army Chief General V.K. Singh launched an unprecedented legal attack on the Indian government over a minor issue; dark rumours of a coup attempt engineered by him appeared in a leading Indian newspaper. Matters were not helped when it became clear that Singh was utilizing a unit of the Army’s military intelligence directorate – in true cloak-and-dagger style it was called the “Technical Services Division” – to bribe politicians in Jammu and Kashmir; nor did things look bright when veterans of the armed forces launched a nationwide campaign to rationalize their pensions.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has traditionally projected itself as a party deeply consonant with the armed forces, a corollary to its muscular self-image. (Singh became a junior foreign minister in Modi’s first term.) When he assumed office, there were palpable expectations that he would usher in the sweeping reforms of the military recommended by successive government appointed committees. Mukherjee, in the last chapter as well as in a postscript of his book, appraises Modi’s approach toward civil-military relations.

After his book appeared in print, the Modi government did take a major step toward institutionalizing jointness among the three-armed forces by agreeing to appoint a Chief of Defense Staff (CDS), in paper like the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (As The Diplomat goes to print, the exact charter of the Indian CDS is unknown though Modi was expected to appoint the first CDS in the coming weeks.) But whether such an appointment is the first of many steps to completely reform India’s sclerotic military apparatus remains unknown. Also unknown is whether in his second term Modi will take further steps to move India’s civil-military relations away from an absent dialogue to an engaged conversation. Should he try the latter, he should look no further than Mukherjee’s book for a roadmap.