In defence of graft

The court martial of Lt. Gen. P.K. Rath in connection with the Sukna land scam is a welcome move by the Army to set its house in order. This case along with the Adarsh Society scam has turned the spotlight on corruption in the military. It is widely assumed that these cases underscore the extent to which corruption from our public life has seeped into the armed forces. Isn’t the military a mirror of the society it serves? This assumption is mistaken. In fact, the corruption highlighted by these cases stems from an increasing divergence between the armed forces and Indian society. And this growing civil-military gap could have other, more serious consequences.
It is commonplace to assert that armed forces reflect the societies from which they arise. But it is wrong. The fact is that civil society is based on an expectation of peace. Military society, by contrast, is predicated on the expectation of war. If this weren’t true at a fundamental level, there need be no hyphen between civil and military. It is this distinction that basically enables civil society to retain the option of using force in pursuit of its policies. Problems, however, could arise if the difference in attitudes and values between the civilian and military worlds (particularly that of elites) becomes too wide.
In the Indian case, a civil-military gap has existed from the outset. India’s civilian elites have had no direct experience of military service. Interestingly, the drafters of the constitution explicitly provided for the possibility of conscription — a step that could have reduced the civil-military gap in the medium term. But the executive decided not to enforce compulsory military service in peacetime and to continue the tradition of a volunteer force.
The subsequent expansion of the gap can be traced to developments in both the civilian and the military end of the divide. Among the former, perhaps the most important changes have been in the realm of the economy. The opening up and rapid growth of the Indian economy over the last two decades have considerably increased the disparity in economic profiles of the civilian and military elites. Prior to this, the military elites could take comfort in a putatively better social profile: “glamour” was an important motivator for officers joining the services. But India’s vaulting economic growth has transformed the social profile of civilian elites and pushed it well above that of the military.
Prominent factors exacerbating the divide from the military side are the recruitment, training and personnel policies adopted by the military. The Indian military recruits its officers at a much younger age than most other democracies that have a volunteer force. The National Defence Academy (NDA) provides a combination of undergraduate education and pre-commission training. The cadets join at the age of 17-18 (it was 16 until the late 1980s) and are commissioned — after further training at the service academies — at the age of 21-22. To be sure, the services have a direct entry scheme which takes in officer cadets after their graduation from the university. But since the late 1980s the senior ranks of the armed forces are overwhelmingly staffed by officers who have gone through the NDA route.
By contrast, the Short Service Commission (SSC) schemes have largely been unable to serve their purpose. The idea of the SSC was to recruit officers who would serve for a fixed period of 5-10 years and then move on. The aim of the SSC, however, remains substantially unfulfilled. The important point from our perspective is that the number of military officials transitioning to the civilian world through this route remains small. Part of the reason for this is that the military provides little by way of serious preparation for an alternate civilian career. The army has a Directorate of Resettlement, but even its most sought after programmes (a course lasting a few months in a top business school, not a full-fledged MBA though) scarcely prepare officers for an increasingly competitive employment market.
The longer an officer remains in service, the more he is hurt by the absence of appropriate resettlement preparation. In consequence, many officers who attain pensionable service but face no prospects of career growth remain reluctant to retire. Moreover, many of them seek re-employment after retirement. The fact that even the most successful officers cannot hope to match the economic and social profile of their civilian contemporaries is surely a key driver for increasing corruption. It is the widening civil-military gap that is eroding the military’s organisational values and discipline.
Corruption, however, is not the only consequence arising from this gap. Equally troubling are some of the ways in which the military is seeking to maintain and project its institutional identity and distinction. This can be seen most clearly in the military’s approach to women officers, which both indicates and potentially accentuates the civil-military gap. Although women have been inducted into the military since 1992, they can serve for no more than 14 years. The military leadership is averse to granting them Permanent Commission owing to what are described as “operational practical and cultural problems”. The military is unwilling to offer women anything more than permanent commissions in the legal and educational branches. This attitude forced some women officers to seek redress from the courts. In March 2010, the Delhi high court directed the government to grant permanent commissions to women officers commissioned before 2006. At the military brass’ request, the government has appealed against this ruling. The contrast with the opportunities for women in the civilian sector (both private and government) is stark indeed.
The recent scams embroiling the military are indicative of a larger trend that could have deleterious consequences. Tackling the growing civil-military gap will require a creative set of policies that will foster a new balance between institutional and societal considerations. Such reforms are imperative for democratic control of the military as well as national security.

Srinath Raghavan is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi