E-Paper
Delinquent politics behind headcount in the Army
The recent spate of foul smelling political opportunism arising out of an ungainly exercise undertaken by the Sachar Committee at the behest of the UPA Govt to take a head count of Muslims serving the Indian armed forces has been terribly devastating for each and every soldier living or dead, belonging to the Indian army. It is in fact being viewed by the Services? fraternity as a sinister attempt to breech the very ethos that was built, nurtured and sustained so painstakingly all these years to preserve the secular face of the army.
The recent spate of foul smelling political opportunism arising out of an ungainly exercise undertaken by the Sachar Committee at the behest of the UPA Govt to take a head count of Muslims serving the Indian armed forces has been terribly devastating for each and every soldier living or dead, belonging to the Indian army. It is in fact being viewed by the Services’ fraternity as a sinister attempt to breech the very ethos that was built, nurtured and sustained so painstakingly all these years to preserve the secular face of the army.
Supposedly planned for the uplift of the status of minorities, no matter how well intentioned this exercise may have been, the one thing that it has clearly confirmed is the virtual quantification of how distant our political class (irrespective of affiliations) has gotten from its own army, where it does not even understand or rather deliberately fails to recognise the basic tenet upon which the Indian army has remained bonded for over three centuries of its existence.
Unfortunately whoever decided upon the brief of resorting to such hideous head count that right from the start had a clear potential to get transformed into an unbridled bout of delinquent politics, had no clue about the demographic structuring of the Indian army. Surprisingly the Sachar Committee, in a bid to collect its ‘pre audit information’ is believed to have been largely influenced by a Massachusetts based American scholar of Indian origin Dr Omar Khalidi’s published work titled, “Khaki and the Ethnic Violence in India”, the very basis of which is admittedly partisan in the first place. What perhaps the Committee did not bother to take note of was the reason that had prompted him to write such a book. Khalidi, according to his own admission during an interview given to India Abroad News Service (IANS) as early as Dec 2003, had categorically spelt out his motives, and I quote “A personal reason was that one of my brothers applied for a commission rank in the Indian Air Force in the late 1960s. He was turned down. To this day he and I are unsure if he was turned down because he was less qualified than others or because he, as a Muslim, was considered a security risk” Unquote, which says it all.
The direct references, which seem to have been taken by the Committee from Khalidi’s thesis, pertain to the mention desertion of some Muslim soldiers during Operation Hope (annexation of Hyderabad by the post partition Indian army in September1948) and a recommendation of the segregation of a section of Muslim population in Turtuk (Ladakh) during the 1999 Kargil imbroglio. Suffice to mention that both these events had no sinister connotations and moreover had no possible connections with the present study.
Historically speaking, perhaps the first and the only time when the Muslims were segregated as suspects was immediately after the 1857 Mutiny/War of Independence and that too they were not alone. The upper caste Hindus too had been similarly castigated, as both Hindu and Muslim soldiers recruited from Oudh comprised the native complement of the Bengal Army that had revolted against the British Raj. Post 1857 witnessed a number of units getting disbanded, besides the advancement of the ‘martial class’ theory by the British as a reward to those natives who had assisted the British in suppressing the rebellion.
Post Independence and partition the Indian army got split into two and as a result a large chunk of Indian Muslim troops went to Pakistan, largely due to reasons of division of assets of the pre Independence Indian army. The theory of initial suspicion over the loyalties of those Muslims who chose to stay back in secular India does appear logical, given the bloodbath that was witnessed during the partition, which again was a political handiwork utilized to serve vested interests. The suspicion however was short lived since the very first chapter of ‘Indian’ Muslim soldier loyalty to the Nation got written with the martyrdom of Brigadier Mohammad Usman in 1948. Thereafter there was no looking back.
That was history. However, I draw my convictions from my own experiences of nearly three decades of soldiering in the Indian army. Military as a profession was the obvious choice for me because I had seen my three real brothers (serving the Indian army, air force and navy respectively) fight for the Nation during the India Pakistan war of 1965. Some years later I stepped into their shoes and found myself as acceptable as perhaps any of my other fellow officers/soldiers irrespective of our individual caste, creed, or religion. So strong was the ethos and bonding that it left no space for religious segregation/ intolerance or apartheid of any kind, for we were all ever too willing to live and die for each other. In uniform our lives revolved around the regimental ‘Izzat-O-Iqbal’ (honour and glory).
As of today there is no change in our military ethos. Ask those who are there.
For there can be no change ever! I may be dubbed by a handful of cynics on either side of the saffron and green spectrum, as someone trying to be ‘more loyal than the king’. But like the rest of my countrymen I know that communal paranoids suffer from a limitation to think that far only!
