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Why India has never seen a military dictatorship

Hithchiker

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https://qz.com/418468/why-india-has-never-seen-a-military-dictatorship/

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NO SECRETS HEREWhy India has never seen a military dictatorship
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No military rule.(Reuters/Mukesh Gupta)

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Anvar Alikhan
June 03, 2015 Quartz India

A true story: In 1957, the then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, visiting the office of general Thimayya, the chief of the army staff, saw a steel cabinet behind his desk, and asked the general what it contained.

The general replied that the top drawer contained the nation’s defence plans. And the second drawer contained the confidential files of the nation’s 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 disciplined, highly professional, and steeped in proud 250-year-old traditions inherited from the British. But this theory doesn’t work, because the Pakistani army was born out of the same traditions and that didn’t 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.

Military dictatorships have been a common phenomenon in the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa. 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 didn’t 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 Jinnah’s 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 Pakistan’s. 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. The Indian Army was born out of the same tradition as Pakistan’s.

Prime minister Nehru believed that the new India needed to rethink 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 India’s first army chief, field marshal Cariappa, publicly criticised the government’s 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 programme that was given fresh urgency in 1958 by the military coup in next-door Pakistan (an occurrence that was worryingly praised by field marshal 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. It’s an achievement that is not sufficiently recognised; 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. 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 paramilitary 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 don’t realise what a luxury that kind of certainty is.





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Joe Shearer

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In my opinion, it was more Pakistan's misfortune than India's good fortune.

Some factors have already been mentioned, and I would like to confine myself to those, rather than go into the quality of leadership that Pakistan has had, a major factor that I explicitly don't want to examine.
  1. The politics of the situation; strong ruling party in India, strong central leadership, strong state leadership; weak one in Pakistan, with a number of leaders who fought with each other:
    1. The Congress Party was strong and was echeloned almost down to the sub-district level. In those days, there was a substantial organisation behind the party; it was Indira Gandhi who emasculated the party by splitting it, keeping the organisation's Tammany Hall leaders out of her faction, to wither on the vine in the 'Old' Congress. The Congress(I) was decidedly focused on the personality of Indira Gandhi. That was emphatically not the case earlier. The Congress had very powerful leaders earlier; it is impossible to bring to mind today the authority of the Kripalanis, Govind Ballabh Pant, and, much later, under Indira, Bahuguna and Tripathi (note how many of them were Brahmin; the Congress was essentially a Brahmin party, n'est ce pas, @jbgt90? Or Brahmon, if you prefer!). There was also the factor of continuity of political rule, and we will take a look at that later.
    2. The Muslim League has been aptly described in the OP as Mr. Jinnah and his Private Secretary. There were other factors as well. The Muslim League had the support of the 'salariat', that section of the Muslims who had taken to modern ways of earning a livelihood, and joined the services, or entered professional life, like Jinnah himself. Most of the effective membership was based in the UP and in Bombay (the Presidency, not the town alone). The Punjab had been Unionist until 1946; the Sind was in a divided mind, right until the end, and the NWFP won a plebiscite on the joining of Pakistan by 1%, after the Khudai Khitmatgar abstained.
  2. The political CONTINUITY of the situation: who led the countries?
    1. In India, Nehru was a dominating presence, until his death in 1964. In those last two years, 1963 and 1964, he was a shadow of his old self, but there was still no challenge within the party. Apart from Nehru, there was a slow, but steady rising up from the depths of the municipal elections of second-, third-, perhaps even a significant fourth-level of leadership.
    2. In Pakistan, after Liaqat Ali Khan's assassination in 1951, there were SEVEN Prime Ministers, until the post itself was abolished in 1958.
  3. Civil society may have been stronger in India than in Pakistan:
    1. There was a viable civilian presence in India of a sort that didn't exist in Pakistan. India retained the strong influence of a middle class, a middle class that was established and influential to an extent not enjoyed by her neighbours, West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The doctors, lawyers, teachers, and the initial batches of engineers from the prestigious IITs, all formed a reasonably large mass relative to the feudal elements, and were sufficiently large enough to influence the vast segment of labourers and farm workers forming the bulk of the population. Besides the professionals, India had an extremely large trading community: a Pakistani Punjabi living on other than meat exclusively was strange and exotic enough to be called dal khor by his Pashtun neighbours, an India with traders and a business community was strange and exotic enough to be called bania by her Pakistani neighbours.
    2. The Muslim League retained those of its supporters who made the dangerous, extremely hazardous journey from India to Pakistan. The Congress lost those of its supporters who were Punjabi, Pashtun and Sindhi, so on balance, the Muslim League lost much more than did the Congress (there was, of course, that one Indian princely state that was partitioned between the Muslim League and the Congress, rather than joining the Dominion that its ruler wished to join, but it was a famous aberration).
Reason enough to lead to a difficult situation, even without the horrors of being led by the liked of Iskandar Mirza and the sinister Ghulam Muhammad. And all this as well as those mentioned in the passage named Ring Fencing the Indian Army, in the OP.
 

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Personally I think the answer lies in the core difference between India and Pakistan, and the historical cultural ethos both different populaces were imbued with over time. Specifically over the period of time one part of the populace turned Muslim.

Ancient Hindu India at the level of the society was always ruled by the Bammans (yes, as a Maratha, I prefer that less than flattering version). Ruled and manipulated. The kings and princes were in their courts. The fighting arms and armies and generals were limited to doing just that. Fight. Till some times the bammans danced too hard on their collective balls, and then some good old fashioned purging of the tenali rams happened.

The modern independent Indian nation was no different. Ruled by the bammans (even now with OBCs and Dalits growing in stature, their entry into the political class makes them the "new" bammans - the creamy layer). With the army largely peripheralized and subservient to them. Not very unlike ancient Rome, to be honest. With the same internal disgust and griping by the generals and the fighting forces. With one section of the armed forces permanently stationed in Rome (New Delhi), more politician than soldier thereafter. But the army carefully kept outside the walled city.

What I guess also helped, more by design than pure chance I'm sure, is the very strong regimental structure of the Indian army, along old linguistic and regional lines, but led by officers from all over, owing their prime allegiance to India above all else. That very social Indian structure of the Indian army I feel ensures that the army will always be Indian, and only Indian first and last. And should some formations mutiny or rise against the republic on other lines, they will be quickly put down by the larger mass of the others, and then permanently disbanded.

What also helps, again by design more than just continuance of the old or chance, is the leadership of the three arms under their individual supreme (military) leaders, with no one all powerful general. Again, the very structure of the Indian armed forces ensures that even that one all powerful general is all powerful only in New Delhi. There are other equally all powerful generals that lead large armies of their own, independently, autonomously. A unified uprising becomes near impossible with such a structure.

Pakistan on the other hand are that part of the Indian populace that converted and joined the league of the invading conquerors. The Muslim invaders and the Hindu bammans had pretty much a hands off policy and unspoken unwritten understanding among themselves. Such that there was barely any resistance, regional or unified, as the Muslim armies literally rolled unopposed into mainland India, all the way up to central and western India till they came up against the Maratha.

In this quid quo pro, the bammans continued to be on top of the pile of Indian Hindu society. Their Rajput sword arms having long since bowed to the invaders. And the invaders having the luxury of being largely unopposed in their capital cities, with huge taxes and produce coming in from the hinterland, and a slow creep of Islamization of India.

India and Hindu society was the proverbial frog, sitting peacefully in a pot of slow boiling water.

Till the British came ....

So Pakistanis by their adopted new theocultural nature are happy to be led by martial strongmen. And democracy for them is the interlude between one general and the other.

Just some rambling thoughts ....

Cheers, Doc
 
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Hithchiker

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In my opinion, it was more Pakistan's misfortune than India's good fortune.

Some factors have already been mentioned, and I would like to confine myself to those, rather than go into the quality of leadership that Pakistan has had, a major factor that I explicitly don't want to examine.
  1. The politics of the situation; strong ruling party in India, strong central leadership, strong state leadership; weak one in Pakistan, with a number of leaders who fought with each other:
    1. The Congress Party was strong and was echeloned almost down to the sub-district level. In those days, there was a substantial organisation behind the party; it was Indira Gandhi who emasculated the party by splitting it, keeping the organisation's Tammany Hall leaders out of her faction, to wither on the vine in the 'Old' Congress. The Congress(I) was decidedly focused on the personality of Indira Gandhi. That was emphatically not the case earlier. The Congress had very powerful leaders earlier; it is impossible to bring to mind today the authority of the Kripalanis, Govind Ballabh Pant, and, much later, under Indira, Bahuguna and Tripathi (note how many of them were Brahmin; the Congress was essentially a Brahmin party, n'est ce pas, @jbgt90? Or Brahmon, if you prefer!). There was also the factor of continuity of political rule, and we will take a look at that later.
    2. The Muslim League has been aptly described in the OP as Mr. Jinnah and his Private Secretary. There were other factors as well. The Muslim League had the support of the 'salariat', that section of the Muslims who had taken to modern ways of earning a livelihood, and joined the services, or entered professional life, like Jinnah himself. Most of the effective membership was based in the UP and in Bombay (the Presidency, not the town alone). The Punjab had been Unionist until 1946; the Sind was in a divided mind, right until the end, and the NWFP won a plebiscite on the joining of Pakistan by 1%, after the Khudai Khitmatgar abstained.
  2. The political CONTINUITY of the situation: who led the countries?
    1. In India, Nehru was a dominating presence, until his death in 1964. In those last two years, 1963 and 1964, he was a shadow of his old self, but there was still no challenge within the party. Apart from Nehru, there was a slow, but steady rising up from the depths of the municipal elections of second-, third-, perhaps even a significant fourth-level of leadership.
    2. In Pakistan, after Liaqat Ali Khan's assassination in 1951, there were SEVEN Prime Ministers, until the post itself was abolished in 1958.
  3. Civil society may have been stronger in India than in Pakistan:
    1. There was a viable civilian presence in India of a sort that didn't exist in Pakistan. India retained the strong influence of a middle class, a middle class that was established and influential to an extent not enjoyed by her neighbours, West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The doctors, lawyers, teachers, and the initial batches of engineers from the prestigious IITs, all formed a reasonably large mass relative to the feudal elements, and were sufficiently large enough to influence the vast segment of labourers and farm workers forming the bulk of the population. Besides the professionals, India had an extremely large trading community: a Pakistani Punjabi living on other than meat exclusively was strange and exotic enough to be called dal khor by his Pashtun neighbours, an India with traders and a business community was strange and exotic enough to be called bania by her Pakistani neighbours.
    2. The Muslim League retained those of its supporters who made the dangerous, extremely hazardous journey from India to Pakistan. The Congress lost those of its supporters who were Punjabi, Pashtun and Sindhi, so on balance, the Muslim League lost much more than did the Congress (there was, of course, that one Indian princely state that was partitioned between the Muslim League and the Congress, rather than joining the Dominion that its ruler wished to join, but it was a famous aberration).
Reason enough to lead to a difficult situation, even without the horrors of being led by the liked of Iskandar Mirza and the sinister Ghulam Muhammad. And all this as well as those mentioned in the passage named Ring Fencing the Indian Army, in the OP.
Excellent read at the morning and worth noting how Pakistan got astray...
 

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As usual you have hit the nail right on the head , you have in great detail presented the civilian side of the events (to some extent) and yes i do agree with most. you forgot the the congress was so powerful that it won most of the seats in NWFP , came second in Punjab and Sind in the 45 election, and yes i do prefer Bamonn to Brahmin :).

But lets look at the issue from the eyes of the military , yes they were the second most powerful and were probably in a place to take over many a times due to the fact there was no one who could stop them . But there was an incident which happened during the first meeting of FM Cariappa , Its said (cant recall the book ) Nehru took the FM to the side and asked him to remember that he was an Indian , what the British did during the independence movement by using the army against its own should never happen again. Nehru wanted the army to stay out of running the country. Cariappa took this advice and went on to dissociate the army from all things political over the next few years, he refused to allow the former jawans of the INA into the army and also removed and made sure no reservations would be made with relation of cast creed and tribe in the recruitment . when the first election happened in 52' he was encouraged by the support of the indian people to the civilian govt . I think he realized that if the army ever took over he would have no support on the ground. People were very dis chanted by any imposed rule on them , Indians in general do not like to be told what to do (now a days being the exception :) ) He then ensured the the army would not interfere .

There were rebukes on many an occasion by the civilian govt which told him to mind his own business. Slowly but surely the culture crept in that the armed services were sub servant to the civil authorities.
While it can be debated what transpired in 2012 that night when two Columns of the army went out of their barracks , one just has to realize that all it took was a call from the then defense sec to have them march back immediately .
Sorry i could ramble on but i am afraid i would bore you.
Like Jinnah said but unfortunately forgotten after his death " On June 14, 1948, he addressed a gathering of army officers at their training academy in Quetta. “I want you to remember,” he said, that the “executive authority flows from the head of the government of Pakistan, who is the governor-general, and therefore, any command or orders that may come to you cannot come without the sanction of the executive head.”"
 

Hithchiker

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Personally I think the answer lies in the core difference between India and Pakistan, and the historical cultural ethos both different populaces were imbued with over time. Specifically over the period of time one part of the populace turned Muslim.

Ancient Hindu India at the level of the society was always ruled by the Bammans (yes, as a Maratha, I prefer that less than flattering version). Ruled and manipulated. The kings and princes were in their courts. The fighting arms and armies and generals were limited to doing just that. Fight. Till some times the bammans danced too hard on their collective balls, and then some good old fashioned purging of the tenali rams happened.

The modern independent Indian nation was no different. Ruled by the bammans (even now with OBCs and Dalits growing in stature, their entry into the political class makes them the "new" bammans - the creamy layer). With the army largely peripheralized and subservient to them. Not very unlike ancient Rome, to be honest. With the same internal disgust and griping by the generals and the fighting forces. With one section of the armed forces permanently stationed in Rome (New Delhi), more politician than soldier thereafter. But the army carefully kept outside the walled city.

What I guess also helped, more by design than pure chance I'm sure, is the very strong regimental structure of the Indian army, along old linguistic and regional lines, but led by officers from all over, owing their prime allegiance to India above all else. That very social Indian structure of the Indian army I feel ensures that the army will always be Indian, and only Indian first and last. And should some formations mutiny or rise against the republic on other lines, they will be quickly put down by the larger mass of the others, and then permanently disbanded.

What also helps, again by design more than just continuance of the old or chance, is the leadership of the three arms under their individual supreme (military) leaders, with no one all powerful general. Again, the very structure of the Indian armed forces ensures that even that one all powerful general is all powerful only in New Delhi. There are other equally all powerful generals that lead large armies of their own, independently, autonomously. A unified uprising becomes near impossible with such a structure.

Pakistan on the other hand are that part of the Indian populace that converted and joined the league of the invading conquerors. The Muslim invaders and the Hindu bammans had pretty much a hands off policy and unspoken unwritten understanding among themselves. Such that there was barely any resistance, regional or unified, as the Muslim armies literally rolled unopposed into mainland India, all the way up to central and western India till they came up against the Maratha.

In this quid quo pro, the bammans continued to be on top of the pile of Indian Hindu society. Their Rajput sword arms having long since bowed to the invaders. And the invaders having the luxury of being largely unopposed in their capital cities, with huge taxes and produce coming in from the hinterland, and a slow creep of Islamization of India.

India and Hindu society was the proverbial frog, sitting peacefully in a pot of slow boiling water.

Till the British came ....

So Pakistanis by their adopted new theocultural nature are happy to be led by martial strongmen. And democracy for them is the interlude between one general and the other.

Just some rambling thoughts ....

Cheers, Doc
Thoughts are as always deeply rooted and connected with history...A bit disagree on Roman if you may allow , Many of the roman heads were General who takeover the entity with having fame by victories and gathering public support along with there army men..
 

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Thoughts are as always deeply rooted and connected with history...A bit disagree on Roman if you may allow , Many of the roman heads were General who takeover the entity with having fame by victories and gathering public support along with there army men..

I was thinking more of the movie The Eagle ...

Cheers, Doc
 

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I guess Indira Gandhi and the Emergency was India's near breaking point without a full blown civil riot.

Cheers, Doc
 

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Excellent read at the morning and worth noting how Pakistan got astray...

...was LED astray.

There's nothing inherently defective in Pakistan or Pakistani people. I won't go further for fear of attracting ridicule as a turncoat, but it was bad leadership, THE EXACT PROBLEM THAT IS AFFLICTING THE NDA, ALSO A NEW PLATFORM WITH NO LEGACY.
 

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Agree.

@jbgt90 reminded me in private conversation that the two near breaking points were the Emergency and the Babri Masjid.

Agree with J. We were very close to an inflection point there, those years. Mumbai was the last throw of the dice for the Muslims. They were already beaten by then. Gujarat just reiterated the point for the future.

Cheers, Doc
 
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