Indian Militarism in a Historical Perspective
After the
Pakistani surrender in 1971, Mrs. Indira Gandhi remarked that it was the first
victory of Indian arms against a foreign power in two thousand years.
The earlier victory, presumably, was Chandragupta Maurya’s success against the
Seleucid empire in 303 BC. This was bad history for various reasons, but it is
not that history that concerns me here. It is, rather, the peculiarity as well
as the universality of the modern Indian relationship with military power, and
the place of militarism in Indian democracy. As a nation-at-arms, modern India
is a case study in desire and distortion. This has been the case, arguably,
since 1882, when Bankim imagined an army of patriot-sannyasis as not just the
defenders but also the core citizenry of a disciplined, technologically capable
nation. Bankim foreshadowed Mrs. Gandhi’s view that war and victory constituted
restoration to history itself; both the writer and the prime minister saw this
restoration as the realization of modernity. In the past few years, however, the
sharpness of the desire for a militarized subjectivity has gone far beyond the
fantasies of Indian nationalists of the period before 1947. In a country where
the military had a low profile even after independence, and the sight of olive
uniforms was a sign of extraordinary disorder, the soldier has become a highly
visible public icon. A rampant militarism has called into question the very
project of modernity that was championed by the ideologues of the Indian state.
The surreal
spectacles of belligerence that have become an everyday reality in India evoke
the ‘alternative modernities’ posited by the Israeli social scientist S.N.
Eisenstadt. On the one hand, news anchors on television channels catering to
middle-class viewers have donned flak jackets and turned their newsrooms into ‘war
rooms,’ where they do battle with Pakistan, Kashmiris and assorted
‘terrorists.’ On the other hand, villagers (also conscious of video cameras) recently
placed the body of a dead Hindu – accused of lynching a Muslim for having beef
in his refrigerator – in a coffin draped with the national flag, simulating a
military funeral. They were affirming, not denying, the dead youth’s complicity
in the murder. Cricket stars and Bollywood celebrities thank the army at every
public function, and declare their willingness to die if the government would
only give the order. An esoteric term like ‘surgical strike’ has become part of
Indian popular culture, overflowing the circle of English literacy. (There was
a time when ‘surgical strike’ implied that doctors at AIIMS had stopped
working, Dilip Menon recently joked.) So has the distinctly pre-modern word ‘martyr,’ translated without
irony from the Islamicate shaheed and used religiously to describe dead
soldiers of either the secular republic or Hindu Rashtra. In more forums than
ever before, the Indian soldier has become an object of reverence, and the
military a sacred icon. Criticism of the armed forces and skepticism about
surgical strikes have acquired the status of blasphemy: television
‘personalities’ scream at the blasphemers, self-appointed public watchdogs
threaten them with prosecution or more summary forms of justice, and editors
and vice chancellors have taken it upon themselves to police disrespect for
‘those guarding our borders.’
The element of
self-appointment is crucial. Good citizens have stepped forward to defend the
honor of the Indian soldier with such enthusiasm that the state and government
have faded into the background, leaving a mob that imagines itself as the
nation. I do not mean ‘mob’ merely in the generic sense of an unruly crowd,
although I am not excluding that meaning either. I am, rather, using the word
in the sense in which Hannah Arendt used it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to describe a racist political community
that cuts across economic classes and acts in the name of the state. As
the mob has adopted the Indian military, Indian militarism has itself been
transformed. It has become a phenomenon that is only apparently outward-directed
and concerned with what we generally understand as ‘defense’ in a world of
nation-states and national interests. The new function of the militarily
assertive state in India is to maintain a condition of national war, or a civil
war that gives meaning to the nation, within a diffuse theater of power that is
generally described as ‘the border.’ Militarism in India operates with
reference to established global models of modern statehood and international
competition. Its primary product, however, is a local, historically specific, gap
between the Indian nation and the Indian state that secretes not only the
rationales and methods of majoritarianism, but also a fascist relationship between
the state and the citizen, with all the intimacy and violence that relationship
implies.
Global Templates
It may be useful,
at the outset, to outline the contours of militarism as a historical
phenomenon. Militarism is not simply enthusiasm for military action; nor is it
limited to the role played by the military in the conduct of state policy. It
is quite different from the ‘warlike’ reputation of tribes or the ‘martial’
pastimes of feudal aristocracies. It is, first and foremost, an aspect and
associate of nationalism: a vision of the military as an extension of the Self
of the self-identified patriot, and as a facilitator of the will of the citizen. It
is also a perception of incompleteness. The nation or nationalized Self is
incomplete in some significant way, which can vary, but invariably completion
is imagined as the product of military power, or as military power itself.
Militarism is, indeed, so intertwined with nationalism that it is impossible to
posit a line where one ends and the other begins, although it is not uncommon –
or inaccurate – to see the former as an excess of the latter.
Joining the
people, the army and the state in a triangle of mutually reinforced
sovereignty, militarism has its roots in eighteenth century Europe, where
Prussian royalty began dressing in military uniforms just when uniforms (and
uniform militaries) in the modern sense came into existence. Prussia was not a
nation-state, but its seminal place in early German nationalism can hardly be
overstated.
In what Benedict Anderson described as ‘official nationalism,’ a monarchy
shoring up its sovereignty could seek to draw upon the desires of its newly
self-conceived ‘people,’ turning itself and its instruments – including the
army – into national icons. These
Germanic roots became deeper and more complex in Napoleonic France, with its
cult of a national army that was also the national citizenry and a
revolutionary guard, simultaneously defending the citizen, exporting the
nation, and completing the revolution.
The longing for
completion, more pronounced in German nationalism than in the French (because
unlike revolution in France, nationhood in Germany was inherently Romantic),
gained more discursive flesh in Italy and Japan. In the former, national
liberation and unification were military accomplishments, and in the latter, the
consumption, display and projection of military power not only underlined the
nation’s breaking of geopolitical shackles imposed by history (generally) and
the Western powers (specifically), but its achievement of the ethos and aesthetics
of technological modernity.
In each of these
cases of militarism, and crucially in some others, colonialism added another dimension,
beginning with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. That
dimension was race. Racism did not, of course, come fully formed into colonial
warfare; it was itself shaped by that bloody history. As
scholars of settler colonialism have shown, the connection between war and whiteness
has a lineage that precedes Napoleon by at least a century. There
is, however, a difference between the racism of settler militias and the
nineteenth-century phenomenon of metropolitan publics following the colonial
adventures of their armies, participating actively in those adventures, or
demanding such adventures, against a racially identified enemy. The latter,
while not fully separate from the former (especially in the American case), is
closely affiliated with the emergence of the nation-state as the center of
populism, and consequently, the cultivation of racism as a basic content of the
experience of citizenship, both in the sense of a horizontal community of ‘the
people’ and in that of a people represented by a particular state. By
the middle of the Victorian century, for instance, the infrastructure of a
popular press was sufficiently advanced in Britain for the Indian Rebellion to
unleash not only a temporary orgy of violent fantasies about niggers and pandies,
but also a lasting culture of war memorials, boys’ literature and bad poetry. The
Spanish-American conflict and the subsequent campaign to retain the Philippines
did something similar for the United States, effecting the transition from
Indian-fighting on an internal frontier to a jingoism that nevertheless
retained a strong trace of the former.
Arguably, by the
turn of the twentieth century, the militarism of what is generally regarded as ‘good
nationalism’ or ‘patriotism’ (Britain, the United States) had caught up with
the militarism of the ‘bad nationalisms’ (Germany, Japan). This
catching up is important, because otherwise we risk falling into a false
divide. That distinction between good and bad nationalisms, which is
essentially a separation between liberal-civic and ethnic conceptions of
nationhood, is not fully sustainable in most contexts. But if the ethnic Self
lurks not far below the surface of all nationalisms, including the avowedly liberal-civic,
it owes much to the emergence of a relatively homogenous militarism that was
ready for its global debut in August of 1914. This militarism proved durable
enough to recover from the shock and disgust – and even the ironic sensibility,
which is the deadliest antidote to nationalism – generated by the Great War.
The mechanics of
this recovery are worth noting briefly. On the one hand, it was facilitated by
the rise of fascism, which revitalized not only the longing for wholeness that
had characterized the fantasy of national war, but also the mob-mentality that
characterized the chronic violence of the colony and the frontier, and at
wartime, the imperial metropole.
This mob violence was inseparable from governance itself.
On the other hand, the rehabilitation of militarism after the Great War was
facilitated by the Second World War, which restored and vastly strengthened the
concept of the good war, and wove war more tightly into the economic, political
and social fabrics of those very nations to which the enthusiasm for soldiering
and large standing armies had come relatively late. The full spectrum of
militarism, including the racist pleasures of colonial warfare, remained
available as culture and as policy to the post-Nazi nation-state. It could
undergo periods of decline, as during the ‘Counterculture’ of the late 1960s,
but rebound easily, as during the Reagan-Thatcher era and then the ‘War on
Terror.’
We must ask, at
this juncture, whether militarism is to be regarded as a default mode of
nationalism in the world after 1945, into which the Republic of India was born.
We can certainly find examples of anti-militarist nationhood in this period:
Japan and to some extent Germany, nation-states that were once saturated in the
glamor of military technology and the moral virtues of soldiering. Both
countries continue to maintain large and powerful military forces, but without
romanticizing war or nurturing a cult of the soldier. (The German case is
complicated by the four-decades-long partition into two ideologically opposed
states.) These, however, were very much the exceptions. If nearly all
contemporary nationalism is militaristic, then is there a meaningful phenomenon
called ‘militarism,’ or a ‘militaristic society,’ at which we can point? The
answer, as in questions about fascism in earnestly democratic states, is ‘yes
and no.’ No, in the sense that militarism is ubiquitous. But yes, in the sense
that it has not become equally central to the articulation of political community
everywhere. Moreover, even in those states where militarism is an obvious
element in national politics (the United States, France), it is restrained and
countered by a great variety of cultural, ideological and political mechanisms
that are rooted in the same classes that anchor nationhood and the nation-state.
These include not only liberal institutions such as the robust protection of free
expression, but also specific discourses – including historical ‘lessons’ such
as the Holocaust – and traditions of dissent, including irony and
individualism. Thus, when love of the military does assume a particular
centrality and threatens to overwhelm other constructions of the politically
engaged Self, it remains possible to identify, interrogate and even confront
the phenomenon.
Superficially,
Indian militarism is similar to these ‘reformed’ militarisms, including the
post-WWII, post-Vietnam, American type.
Indeed, it is often patterned after that model, with its exhortations to
‘Support the Troops,’ ostentatious displays of flags and ‘Semper fi’ stickers
on windshields, and apparently inexhaustible willingness to bomb Third World
countries. American militarism, however, rests very substantially upon a long
and broad-based tradition of actual military service. Multiple and overlapping
historical factors – old settler-colonial militias, Jacksonian frontier
democracy, the absence of a true peasant class, perhaps a Scots-Irish
enthusiasm for fighting, and certainly the twentieth-century history of
conscription – have ensured that in spite of the controversies over elite deferments
in the Vietnam years, military service in America cuts across classes and
regions and includes the militarists.
Those who ‘support the troops’ often have relatives in the armed forces, and
the ‘Semper fi’ decal indicates that the driver is probably a Marine. In India,
on the other hand, peasants constitute the great majority of troops, while the
middle class – safe from conscription, which it sometimes fantasizes about but is
unlikely to tolerate – has provided the officers and the cheerleaders. It is,
in that sense, vicarious: removed from the actual military, and a compulsive
attempt to close that distance.
That distance
cannot be closed by ordinary, prosaic means. While it would be uncharitable to
suggest that Indian militarists are cowards, afraid to do the fighting they
advocate, it is fair to note that military service does not fit the
professional, economic and status-based aspirations of middle-class India. They
have (to borrow Dick Cheney’s words) other priorities, which define them as a
class apart.
The angst of incomplete citizenship that drives Indian militarism is located
partly in that gap, which must be filled in with extravagant gestures and wild
rhetoric. The gestures and the rhetoric have come to include a naked
intolerance of dissent that further erodes the already weak protections of free
speech – which, fundamentally, is minority speech and the minority condition
itself – provided by the Indian Constitution.
The erosion and
the original weakness are part of the same trend: both are based on the
presumption that Indian nationhood is not only beleaguered and fragile, its
most appropriate remedy is the lock-step of military discipline. Thus, while
the current flowering of militarism in India is all too ready to take its
rhetorical cues from America, and shares the racist element within American
belligerence, it differs from the American model in that it is far more
ambivalent about democracy. On the one hand, it equates democracy with
majoritarianism. Militarism then becomes the defining stance of ‘the people,’
excluding its targets as well as its critics from the nation. On the other
hand, it sees democracy itself as a weakness in the nation. The military itself
then becomes not only the preferred model of nationhood, its worship becomes
the solution to the weakness exposed by democratic politics. In that sense,
Indian militarism is actually closer to ‘crisis mode’ militarisms elsewhere in
the world, particularly interwar Europe (where crisis was sandwiched between
two catastrophes) and Israel (where crisis is a chronic national ideology).
What we are seeing in India at the present time is a sharp movement in the
latter direction.
Early Indian Militarism
The perception
of incompleteness – the existence of an unacceptable gap between the citizen
and the soldier – is as old as Indian nationalism itself, but we can identify
three distinct phases, each producing a different key of militarism but also
drawing substance from earlier models and emphases. In the period between the
1880s and the 1940s, Indian nationalists had no army to call their own. They
were highly conscious that an army of at least two hundred thousand Indians existed
in their state, but it was not their state.
They were, moreover, excluded from that army by the colonial regime as well as
by themselves, through a combination of class, ethnic, gender and political
calculations. It was not an absolute exclusion: beginning in the interwar
period (and in some provisional cases, even earlier), limited numbers of
Indians began to enter the officer corps of the colonial armed forces.
Also, mass recruitment in Punjab during the Second World War produced an unforeseen
phenomenon: the reconfiguration of demobilized soldiers – peasants equipped with
military training and infected with the ‘martial races’ ideology of colonial
ethnology
– as militias that played a major role in the Partition killings.
But the Indian officers were few, remote, and politically contained by their
loyalty to the colonial power, and the World War II veterans were not only late
on the scene, they remained a mob that ‘respectable’ Indian nationalism was not
yet ready to own.
Consequently,
when nationalist Bengalis, Maharashtrians and Punjabis imagined themselves as
soldiers, they had to operate not only outside the state, but also outside the
institutional realities of soldiering in India. They found their armies in the
realm of pure fantasy (as in Bankim’s novels), in admiration of Europe and
Japan, and then in the rag-tag revolutionary societies that began to appear in
India by the last decade of the nineteenth century. These pursuits were vexed
not only by their detachment from strategic and even tactical realism (and containment
within the domains of mysticism and adolescent play), but also by the total
failure to acquire the most basic requirement of an army: a substantial body of
troops. Not only did peasants – including those groups that joined the colonial
army – remain indifferent, the middle class itself was admiring but not
especially engaged.
In the first
decades of the twentieth century, two new trends became evident. One was epitomized
by the formation in 1925 of the RSS, with its khaki uniforms, stiff-armed
salutes and parade-ground drills. Inspired by the feeder units of European militarism,
especially youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Jugendbund (the
early Hitler Youth), as well as older Indian educational projects like the DAV
and Ramakrishna Mission schools (which cannot themselves be termed
militaristic, but which emphasized disciplined masculinity and national service),
the RSS produced a level of membership, regimentation, structure and visibility
that swadeshi-era revolutionary groups like Jugantar and Anushilan had never
achieved. Just as importantly, RSS ideologues introduced an overtly racist way
of thinking about the Indian population, about Muslims, and about the role of
the nation-state in the management of enemies. The
RSS could afford to be visible; it did not threaten the colonial regime. In
spite of the treatises on race and governmentality, its vision of an Indian
state remained curiously disconnected from any quest for independence. This was
still a fantasy of war, or playing soldiers, within a playground provided by
British rule, and it is only fitting that the soldiers resembled colonial
police constables armed with bamboo sticks.
The other development
was the emergence in India of middle class men who did not (and usually could
not) join the colonial army but became visionaries of military professionalism.
Unimpressed by the secretive revolutionary societies with their ineffective
weapons and lack of a discernible strategic vision, these men – often boys –
borrowed the framework of the colonial state and its army, but imagined
themselves as its statesmen and generals. They were Romantics, in the sense
that they felt the need for military
power as a requirement of the nationally-identified Self, but they were also
rationalists, in love with technology and a chessboard vision of the world. Thus,
as early as during the Great War, a young Nirad Chaudhuri would haunt the
shipyards to inspect British warships, and studied the specifications of German
artillery.
Torn between loyalism and rebellion but imagining both as
military-technological expertise, he began to hope that in the foreseeable
future, either the imperial or the national leadership would invite him into
its planning chambers. Others, like Rashbehari Bose and Taraknath Das, came out
of the revolutionary societies of swadeshi-era Bengal, but went abroad.
Traveling to Europe, America and Japan opened their eyes to a world of strategic
alliances and possibilities. Having escaped the cage of a colonized land, they
discovered a wider geography of oceans, navies, nation-states and
nationally-identified (but internationally engaged) expatriates and
revolutionaries. They became fascinated by the ongoing debates on military and
diplomatic policy, and admired those who were able to articulate coherent
visions of power-projection. The India they imagined and plotted for, however
ineffectually, was a player on that newfound strategic map, cooperating and
competing with sovereign powers and empires on terms that were not so much
equal as aspirational.
Clusters of such
men – many of them students – gathered in Germany, Japan, Britain and the
United States. Their relations with the organized mainstream of Indian
nationalism could be tense, and a part of the reason lay in their obsession
with warfare. ‘They are all Nietzscheans,’ Lajpat Rai remarked in disgust after
meeting some of them in London after the Great War. Some
of the ‘Nietzscheans’ returned to India and became well-regarded academics and
public figures. The sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar was the most prominent and
accomplished of these, and his career – until his death the year after Indian
independence – illuminates how they were simultaneously insiders and outsiders.
Sarkar was both avowedly patriotic and strikingly cosmopolitan, being literate
in multiple European languages and having spent many years abroad in the world
of sovereign states. He had an elaborate, complex vision of an independent
Indian state as an armed player in the world, and had worked out the policies
and strategies – domestic and foreign – that might allow a fledgling
nation-state to maximize its power.
The particulars of Sarkar’s patriotism were, however, alarmingly alien to
nationalist politicians: he appeared to value the state over the nation. Nehru
knew Sarkar personally, but ignored him when it came to taking advice.
The ultimate
exemplar of such marginalized militarism was, of course, Subhas Bose, who
Sarkar idolized. Sarkar was convinced of the need for coercion in democracy,
and Bose’s commitment to democracy was even thinner. In
Bose, we see a highly developed flowering of the strategic yearnings of Indian
nationalists who were not only located outside the colonial state, but were
also external to the priorities of the organized anti-colonial movement, which,
by and large, had not sought to challenge the imperial power on strategic
grounds. Bose’s appearance at the head of the Indian National Army, attached to
a government in exile and allied with Germany and Japan, came close to a
realization of the militarized nation-state, albeit one that was unconvincing
and abortive. His traversing of the continents – the treks to Afghanistan, the
Soviet Union and Germany, the epic submarine voyage to the eastern theater of
the world war, the crisscrossing of wartime Asia, the movement into Burma and
India, and finally the bomber flight to nowhere (which could be Taiwan,
Manchuria, Siberia, India or Japan) – was almost literally a projection of the
nation into the world of war, weapons and strategic maneuvers, and an
exhibition of mastery of those domains. The
INA was on the losing side of the conflict, but for middle-class nationalists, it
was a far more satisfying approximation of a nation at war than the much larger
Indian Army or the ‘India’ that took its seat at the victors’ table in 1945.
On the eve of
independence, therefore, Indian militarism had already diverged into two
streams. One was an explicitly Hindu channel, with the RSS as its climactic
product. It might be categorized as paramilitary rather than military in its
focus, in the sense that it was provincial, centered on the geography of the
national home rather than on a map of the world. The other was relatively
secular, stridently technological, and obsessed with locating the nation in a
world of armed states. Its great institution was the INA, which, for all its
military failures, was explicitly and recognizably a ‘real’ national army, and
as such, a facsimile of a disciplined, homogenous and horizontal national
community. Its value to the Indian
patriot was that it not only functioned as a ‘clean’ counterpart of the messy,
embarrassing and apparently pre-modern politics of caste, religion and region
(which belied the very existence of the nation), but also that it allowed the
middle-class nationalist to claim the horizontal community of brotherhood or nationhood
as well as a vertical structure in which the commanders came from the existing
socio-economic elites. No challenge to that hierarchy was seriously
entertained. That, indeed, is part of the appeal of any national military,
which is simultaneously flattening and top-down, potentially revolutionary but
reliably conservative.
In each stream,
two further patterns remained evident. One was a weak attachment to any functioning
Indian state. That state remained colonized, academic, fantastic or
‘alternative’: the longed-for place in the modern sun that was always beyond
the reach of the political machinery of nationalism. This predicament generated
the second pattern, which was a premium on frustration as a hallmark of Indian
militarism. To be a true believer in the nation-at-arms was to be convinced
that the nation itself was suffused with indifference, and that ‘politics’ –
effectively, the need to accommodate the agency of the masses – had encrusted
and handicapped the military potential of the state.
Wars of Frustration
The next phase of
Indian militarism can be identified as the period between 1947 and 1998, i.e.,
the years between independence and the second set of nuclear weapons tests at
Pokhran. This is a paradoxical phase, because while an armed and sovereign
Indian nation-state was visibly present in that half century, the army itself
was not very visible, and the register of war-mongering was relatively muted. If
frustration with an elusive state is a key component of militarism in India,
such frustration was harder to justify in this period. It was, nevertheless, a
significant and revealing period, because it became clear that the mere
existence of a sovereign nation-state was not enough to generate the completeness
that nationalists longed for, even when that state engaged in fighting a succession
of wars. A gap remained between the state of war and the nationalist citizen.
Part of the
reason for this unsatisfactory state lay in the nature of the organized
nationalist leadership. The Congress after the Great War was a political
machine, geared to win elections, holding together not only ‘the masses’ but
also vast feudal and business interests that were, by and large, insular and protectionist
in their outlook.
Its leaders were quite aware that only a small part of their constituency ‘saw’
a world that was wider than India, or, at most, wider than the India-Britain
relationship. Indeed, as the organization became broader based, the leaders
themselves came from relatively insular, provincial constituencies. Their
priorities lay in management of nationally-deployed interest groups, not
‘national interests.’ Moreover, with Gandhi playing a dominant role in shaping
the agenda of activism, there was little room for military fantasy in the party’s
narrative. The obvious exceptions were Nehru and Bose, both of whom watched
world affairs closely and were convinced that the Congress needed a foreign
policy.
But by the late 1930s, Bose (a misfit) had been pushed out of the party, and
Nehru – with his anti-fascist principles – found it increasingly difficult to articulate
a strategic position that differed significantly from that of the empire and
the colonial state. After 1945, Nehru had lost even his fascist enemies.
The coterie that
inherited the administration of independent India in 1947 thus lacked any
militaristic credentials whatsoever. Not only were they removed from the
shorts-and-sticks displays of the RSS (which was, moreover, damaged by its
association with Gandhi’s murder), they were – as machine politicians – cut off
from the strategic enthusiasts. Moreover, they did not try hard to hide their
suspicion of their own armed forces, which had, after all, been the military of
the colonial state, deployed against the Congress itself as recently as the
Quit India Movement of 1942-44. The
higher officer corps in that period was almost entirely carried over from the
pre-1947 period, and while generals like Thimaiyya and Cariappa – like most
Indian officers in the 1940s – were nationalists in their own right, they
remained tainted by their association with the colonial regime. They were, in
addition, known to be considerably to the right of the government, in the sense
that they were unsympathetic to its avowed objectives of socialism and
non-alignment. In the first years of Indian independence, with the civilian
institutions of governance still new and fragile, the possibility of a military
coup (as in Pakistan in 1958) was a real anxiety, and there was no reason for
the government to encourage a cult of the armed forces. This is precisely why
keeping the military out of public life was a widely accepted political norm,
one which the military itself came to see as a part of its ethos. The high
profile of a general (subsequently Member of Parliament) like V.K. Singh or G.D.
Bakshi (who retired to become a hawkish media star) in recent years has not
been the Indian norm; even the charismatic Sam Maneckshaw was more circumspect.
For all that,
Nehru and his colleagues were not averse to war, to the maintenance of armed
forces, to the discourse of military necessity, or even to the symbolism of
weaponry. Nehru signed the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives
soldiers immunity from prosecution in civilian courts while engaged in
counterinsurgency operations. He accepted the ritual of Republic Day, when the
Indian state parades its tanks and missiles like the Maharaja of Patiala
parading naked and erect before his subjects. In spite of their political mismatch,
the first prime minister and the senior Indian Army and Air Force officers had
all wanted to expand the 1947-48 war beyond Kashmir. They
were restrained only by circumstances beyond their control. Nehru had not
hesitated to deploy Indian forces to the Congo in a combat role as part of the
United Nations Katanga operations in 1961. The 1962 war was precipitated as
much by Indian recklessness as by Chinese ‘treachery.’ It
is worth noting that India went to war far more often in that period than
subsequently. Indeed, if we count the military deployments, the numbers add up
quickly: the limited war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the so-called (and extremely
bloody) ‘police action’ in Hyderabad,
the annexation of Goa, the clash with China, the wars with Pakistan in 1965 and
1971, the ill-fated intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war, and the
counterinsurgency in the northeast that continues today. Indian military spending
until 1962 was modest but it was not inconsiderable, and Nehru gave every indication
of wanting to build up a credible structure of force, with the continuous
acquisition of modern weaponry from every available source.
He was, in that regard, not entirely detached from the strategic fantasists of
the interwar years.
Nehru’s enthusiasm
for military self-assertion, however, remained unconvincing. It was tempered by
his affiliation with specific ideologies – anti-colonialism, non-alignment, liberal
democracy, socialism – and by an apparent respect for international mechanisms
of conflict-resolution. Nehru the nationalist thus frequently came under the
shadow of Nehru the internationalist. That shadow may have been spurious,
because Nehru’s ‘internationalism’ is best understood as an attempt to shape a
world order in which the victims of colonialism – including India – had a voice
both within and without the established institutions. But militarism does not
permit a plurality of ‘victims’: there can be only one relevant victim of
history. The prime minister’s readiness to link India’s history and destiny
with those of others gave him his reputation as a naïve idealist who (unlike
Bose or Patel) lacked either a cold, clear sense of ‘the national interest,’ or
the toughness to pursue it.
Even the wars that
were fought in this period failed to produce a sustainable bellicosity. After
some initial coverage in the press, few noticed the IPKF deployment in Sri
Lanka: the long war was soon recognized as an embarrassing mistake, best ignored
until it could be wound down. The 1971 conflict, with its unambiguous victory
and successful defiance of American and Chinese pressure, generated much
exultation, but it was contained and curtailed by the very modest Indian media infrastructure
of the time. There was little in the way of television, radio had all the
charisma of a bureaucracy, the press was genteel, and nowhere was there a
financial incentive to turn war into culture. Moreover, Indian belligerence and
celebration in 1971 were both moderated by the particular discourse of the
conflict, in which the primary victim was not India, but another people. There
was, in other words, no conviction of ‘being wronged’ on which militarism might
feed and flourish, and victory produced no extended diminution of the political
domain in favor of the military. Indeed, barely a year after the Pakistani
surrender in Bangladesh, most Indians were more concerned with the turmoil that
would climax in the Emergency, than with any newfound fetish of the military.
Even the Pokhran nuclear test of 1974 brought only a brief flush of muscular
narcissism.
The earlier wars
were fought in an even poorer media environment than the Bangladesh conflict.
In 1965, Lal Bahadur Shastri did attempt to harness some populist zeal with the
Jai jawan, jai kisan slogan, but middle-class
militarism is an attempt to claim soldiers for the modern community, not clump
them together with peasants. Shastri was operating within the old Congress mode
of building political coalitions in the agricultural heartland, not asserting a
modern state of war.
Moreover, while the scale of the incompetence that every branch of the Indian
military showed in 1965 is only now beginning to emerge, even then the outcome
of the war was regarded with such ambivalence that only Shastri’s death saved
the government from having to answer the kinds of questions that had arisen
during the war with China three years previously.
Incompetence,
particularly the military variety, is more historically and ideologically
meaningful than incompetents are usually given credit for. The 1962 war was a
shocking spectacle of incompetence on all fronts: military, political,
diplomatic and bureaucratic. The
incompetence was quite predictable, because war-fighting capability at that
level requires institutional maturity and, more nebulously and importantly, widely
disseminated habits and mentalities of modernity that can come only with
universal literacy, the dismantling of feudal economic relations, and an ethos
of horizontal community, i.e., equality. In India, fifteen years into independence,
none of that existed. Nehru was frank enough to acknowledge that he and his
colleagues in the government had been ‘somewhat amateurish.’ That
amateurishness, which could be interpreted as either an incomplete nationhood
or as unfitness for statehood, was – and remains – extremely difficult for Indian nationalists to
come to terms with. It was an unnerving reminder of older narratives of
incompetence, especially if one accepted the fable that the ‘last victory’ was
two thousand years ago.
Moreover, the
Indian middle class was quite comfortable with its position of privilege in a
predominantly subaltern population, and had no intention of investing in the
modernity of social organization that gives a tiny country like Israel its
long-standing military advantage over much larger Egypt. In India, that kind of
modernity would have been revolutionary. It might have required the respectable
classes to make do without servants, or to eat with their servants, or to let
their daughters marry their servants (and by extension, to let their daughters
make other autonomous sexual choices). It is worth noting that the Indian Army itself
has steadfastly refused to give up the ‘orderly’ system, in which officers are
allowed to use enlisted men as their personal servants.
(Even the Pakistan Army has given it up.) Those who celebrate the Indian
soldier have not found it necessary to intervene in something so normal.
The nationalist
response, therefore, was to find scapegoats. In this search, the military – not
only the overt symbol of national sovereignty and potency, but also an
apparently permanent institution – fared better than the elected government, which
was compromised by its transient and political nature. A few generals who were
known to be a favorites of the government could be included among the villains,
but otherwise the honor of the ‘martyred’ soldier had to be salvaged with
narratives of political ineptitude, weakness and treachery that are as old as
nationalism itself, and that have historically surfaced (“we were made to fight
with one hand tied behind our back,” and so on) whenever nationalists have had
to deal with the inadequacies of their martial mythologies.
The second phase
of the nation’s relationship with the military thus had the quality of an
unfinished product or a stunted animal. Having got their state, their army and
their wars, those patriots who had longed for a militarily assertive
nation-state found that the nation, the army and the war-fighting state were
not coterminous. In the absence of conscription or mandatory military service,
the wars entered into by the state were far from being everybody’s wars. On the
one hand, the military and the nation could be insulated from unsatisfying
wars. On the other, that possibility of insulation made all wars fall short. Moreover,
while Hindu rhetoric was not entirely missing from these wars (Indira Gandhi’s
depiction as Durga in 1971 is the best known example),
there was no sustained attempt to link the conflicts to a discourse of Hindu
victimhood or revenge. Even in 1971, the potentially explosive fact that
Bengali Hindus were disproportionately targeted by the Pakistani military was
carefully downplayed by the Indian government and news media, not least because
it would have unleashed a revenge narrative that was at odds with the
priorities of the Indian state. But
if these ‘shortcomings’ were a source of frustration for those who wanted a
different kind of militarized nationhood, it must be remembered that
frustration only intensifies militarism and gives it new facets. For the
middle-class patriot in the 1990s, therefore, not only had the Indian/Hindu
nation not fully realized itself through its army and its wars, the failure was
inseparable from the emerging narrative of the ‘pseudo-secular’ state and its
politics of ‘minority appeasement.’
Mind the Gap: Militarism in the Age of
Hindutva
The third phase
was announced by the nuclear tests in 1998. The tears of joy on the face of the
Home Minister, the jubilant crowds of men in the streets of provincial towns and
major cities, and the sadhus performing Hindu religious rites near the test
site (in celebration, not penance, lest anybody be confused), all broadcast on
television, belong firmly within the militarism of the present day. They
were, if not its starting point, its inauguration. The mini-war in Kargil,
which came along conveniently the following year (a gift from the Pakistani
military leadership), cemented the new model, giving us the now-familiar
spectacle of television anchors posing with artillery units and playing the hyperventilating
war reporter, twenty-four-hour footage of fighter planes taking off between
advertisements for cheap motorcycles and skin-whitening cream, retired generals
giving blood-curdling lectures to IIT students, and personalized
stories of ‘martyrs’ and ‘heroes’ who multiplied and morphed into celebrities,
to be appropriated by celebrities from the world of entertainment. The
soldier, the reporter, the scientist (Abdul Kalam’s status as the ‘good Muslim’
who is good because he is a missile engineer who wrote bad poetry about nuclear
weapons began at this time),
the celebrity, the politician and the viewer merged into a heady package of
feel-good citizenship.
The critical
changes that enabled these developments are, at one level, structural and
easily identified. A post-1947 educational system that privileged first
engineering and then business management had, by the 1980s, produced a middle
class that valued technocracy and efficiency of command, and was essentially
illiterate in the humanities and social sciences, seeing these not only as frivolous
and effeminate pursuits, but also as subversive of the fundamental mythologies
of nationhood. These included not only ‘great narratives’ like responsibility
for the Partition and the role of Muslim kings in Indian history, but also
lesser details like Kashmir’s place in the nation, and the definitions of commonly
used terminology like ‘terrorist’ and ‘national security.’ For this unevenly
educated class, the military – with its supposed efficiency, order and
technical competence – was the counterpoint not only to the dirt and corruption
of politicians, but also the ‘sedition’ of intellectuals. The
unquestioning obedience and apparent self-sacrifice of the soldier, rather than
the treacherous speech of the campus radical, was the preferred mode of
citizenship. Obedience and hierarchy were long established norms within Indian
nationalism, but a liberal-humanist streak had nevertheless emerged. More
compromised than liberalism inevitably is by other national, racial and
imperial priorities, it was a fragile but important component of Indian
democracy. That liberalism was literally educated out of the middle class (and
middle-class men in particular) in the three decades after independence, as
part of the quest for ‘development.’ When ‘security’ replaced ‘development’ as
the central narrative of the Indian state in the 1990s and 2000s, it found
ready acceptance.
Even more
obviously, economic liberalization had expanded the scale and scope of consumerism
in India.
A much larger middle class, for which consumption was the most immediate marker
of class identity, had sprung up, and shown itself to be highly interested in
consuming war. Although this class was made possible by the economic policies
initiated by the Congress in 1991, it quickly showed its greater fondness for
the BJP, and its growing size and appetite for consumption – which was more
than ever a form of speech, but unlike ‘free’ speech, compatible with
majoritarian and reactionary politics – kept it from becoming irrelevant even
when the BJP was out of office. Simultaneously and not coincidentally, the
media infrastructure – television in particular – had become vast, omnipresent,
and reoriented to sell everything that could be marketed, including,
especially, itself. As a part of this marketing, it sold America, or at any
rate, a version and aspect of America that also emerged in 1991, with CNN’s
coverage of the war against Iraq. This
America, viewed in its own context, was grounded in the Reagan-era makeover of
the crises of imperialism generated by the Vietnam War. For Indian television
producers and audiences, however, it was a shiny, seductive and aspirational
vision of power undiluted by irony or self-doubt, in which images of missile
launches and unbloodied soldiers functioned as shorthand for having arrived at
the global shopping mall. Sometimes the soldiers were pictured dead, bandaged or
decorously boxed and flag-draped, but never in large numbers. The American
lesson from Vietnam came ready-made and packaged: the ‘martyr’ had to remain a
vicarious Self, distant enough and few enough to be quasi-fictional and
unthreatening.
At another
level, the changes that made the second phase of Indian militarism possible are
ideological and harder to isolate. The new middle class was not fully separate
from the old, but it partially swallowed and digested its predecessor. In the
process, it produced bastardized versions of the strategic and military-technological
preoccupations that went back almost a century, and added the overtly
Hindu-nationalist and racist elements that had been contained within the
RSS-affiliated fringe. After 1998, when the BJP demonstrated its ability to
form and lead a governing coalition, the cult of the Indian soldier also became
an apparent reconciliation of the nation and the state. In this new political
environment, soldier-worship was a part of how the BJP differentiated itself
from the Congress and the Left parties. This was not so much the transcendence
of the ‘domestic’ agenda of Ayodhya and anti-Muslim pogroms, as its extension
to the domain of foreign affairs.
It was, in that sense, the reconciliation of the RSS and INA streams of Indian
militarism, and a transition from the militarism of frustration to a militarism
of triumphalism. (It has become popular for the Hindu right to seek to co-opt
the INA itself, by describing it, rather than the Congress, as the true
precipitator of Indian independence.)
The nature of
that triumph is highly ambiguous, because the nationalist understanding of
foreign affairs was itself transformed as a result of its capture by those who
had concerned themselves primarily with a different history. The older emphasis
on inserting the nation into a world of strategy and power that had its own
autonomous existence was replaced by a vision of the world as a theater of
Hindu-nationalist historical revenge: a delusional self-centeredness and
provinciality that would have been quite comical to Sarkar, Bose and their
contemporary advocates of Realpolitik in foreign policy. Moreover, it is
evident that some of the players on this stage have left the Indian state that was
acquired in 1947, and are looking for a posture of holding on. Provinciality,
thus, has had to find common ground with deracination. The consequence has been
a highly stressed nationalism that must protect itself from fragmentation by
posing with weapons and soldiers. It would be difficult to find a better
example of this phenomenon than the tendency of some Indian-Americans to see
Donald Trump as an ally, and the bizarre show they staged in Trump’s honor in
New Jersey. Indian dancers were ‘attacked’ by light-saber-wielding ‘terrorists’
speaking faux-Arabic, and rescued by American commandos, following which
everybody grabbed an American flag and did a Bollywood-style dance to Bruce Springsteen’s
“Born in the USA.”
We have here what
is literally a new world: the distortion of the strategic globe into a flat
earth, or perhaps one of Eisenstadt’s alternative modernities. The performance in
New Jersey was not satire. Nor was it simply the muddled loyalties of
immigrants in an era in which concepts like ‘emigration’ and ‘immigration’ have
become obsolete, and ties to the old country are kept alive by frequent travel,
unbroken families, the Internet, globalized Bollywood and state-sponsored
schemes of dual citizenship. It represented, rather, the performance of a
nationalized subjectivity that needed the state (or multiple states) as a prop
and an embellishment, but was not wedded to any particular state, any more than
a peasant is wedded to a particular state. It is also representative of the hyper-nationalist
who has emigrated to an imperfectly understood world without actually leaving
home. The well-known NRI or Non-Resident Indian (affluent first-generation
Indian immigrants in the West, a key source of support for the Hindu right wing
in India) is paralleled by the less famous Indian in Gujarat and Haryana whose nationalism
is rendered desperate by his envy of New Jersey.
His triumphalism is interwoven with desire for what one would like to purchase
but cannot afford, and he continuously becomes a cheap, distorted copy of the
foreign patriot.
That distorted
and distorting foreigner, while generally American, carries more
purpose-specific passports as well. The most common such passport, for the
Indian militarist, is Israeli. This is not entirely new (Israel has long had
its Indian admirers)
but it has taken on a new dimension lately with the Indian prime minister’s
explicit mention of the Israeli military as a model for the Indian. Israeli
references are important in Hindutva for many reasons, but two in particular
concern me here.
One is the historical distortion that becomes inevitable when a nation of more
than a billion people, with deeply rooted and widely manifested traditions of
ethno-religious intertwining and coexistence, seeks to model itself on a
garrison state of six million that is also a settler colony, an ethnocracy and
an occupying power. The
other is a political and ideological effect. Israeli militarism is, among other
things, the projection outwards of an enmity that is internal to the population
of the state. The Israeli outlook on the world reflects not only the Holocaust,
but also a paranoid expectation that ‘it could happen again,’ executed by
Palestinians or ‘Arabs.’
This expectation makes it virtually impossible for the Israeli state to operate
in the world in the mode of a normal power; it must forever function as a rogue
state (albeit with powerful friends), interpreting the world in the light of
its internal struggle. This predicament is an existential incompleteness: a gap
between the (Israeli) state that includes Palestinians, and the (Jewish) nation
that does not.
As noted earlier, a similar gap between the nation and the state has long
marked Indian militarism, and functioned as a source of frustration. Now,
however, it is functioning as the norm. The gap is there to be maintained, and the
state is there to preserve it. We can say that the gap between the nation and
the state has been closed in India only in the sense that the state now manages
the gap.
The gap can
manifest itself as a strategic space, a state of exception, a campus, or
Kashmir.
It is the space in which Muslims must live (or conversely, be discouraged from
renting or buying a home) as aliens and racial inferiors; it is also the space
in which Hindus can maneuver between being global citizens engaged in something
as cosmopolitan as the ‘war on terror,’ and being ethnic nationalists who feel
oppressed by an ‘appeased’ minority. Within it, they can be citizens of a
constitutional democracy, but also seek to intimidate or lock up
‘anti-national’ scholars, and punish actors who refuse to come out as
anti-Pakistan.
It can manifest itself as ‘the border’: a curious terminology, reminiscent of
the old American concept of ‘the frontier,’ that has come to permeate Indian
culture, from war movies (straightforwardly titled ‘Border’) to everyday
exhortations to remember that ‘soldiers are dying on the border.’ In the
makeshift modernity of the Indian nation, which never had borders before the
colonial state, the border is now everywhere. It is not simply where the Indian
state meets the Pakistani state. It is, rather, where the Indian nation that
has triumphantly taken possession of its state meets its inner, inescapable,
essential Pakistan. It has been remarked that the Pakistani state that emerged
in 1947 was so suddenly improvised that it had a magical, ethereal quality.
It might be added that many Hindus found it considerably easier to realize
Pakistan: it was always next door, no matter where one lived. The border in
India is a state of mind, i.e., a norm of governance and citizenship.
Signifying the
border has become the most specific function of the armed forces. The most
obvious site of this signifying is, of course, Kashmir, which has become not so
much a physical space as a toxic cloud of permissions, restrictions and
sentimentalities. Here, the state can torture, maim, kill and impose curfews
with impunity, because such governance is permitted by the special quality of
the national border. Criticism of that permission is immediately dismissed as
sentimentality, and this dismissal or silencing is made possible by the actual
sentimentality, which is the cult of the brave jawan. The belligerence with
which a talk show host insists that nobody can impugn the ‘honor’ of the Indian
soldier is derived from the same ‘border’ that nurtures (and needs) a Nehru-era
law like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, but it is the extension of that
border into the living rooms of civilians. The safer those civilians are, the more
unsafe they claim to feel, and the more thankful they become ‘to those guarding
our border.’ Grateful patriots show their gratitude by assaulting a handicapped
cinema-goer who did not stand for the national anthem (a new requirement at
Indian movie theaters), and by demanding that such ingrates be arrested. The
police have duly obliged, and their action defended by Bollywood stars,
because, well, ‘soldiers are dying.’ A
concept like the ‘honor’ of the soldier, enforced by the civilian mob, becomes
utterly incompatible with democracy, although it may not be out of place in the
Klingon Empire. Yet it is precisely because democracy has put down tenacious roots in India that militarism is more dangerous there than in states where the army is in control. In India, the distortion of democracy comes from the people: i.e., from democracy itself.
Conclusions
Under specific
and unusual circumstances, usually involving catastrophic and total defeat in
war, nationalism can be purged of militarism. In India, such purging is
inconceivable, not only because India has not known war on that scale, but also
because India’s military engagements have been limited to the domain of the
state. The nation, meanwhile, has fought other wars: wars of desire for a
state, wars of strategic fantasy, wars of frustration, wars in khaki shorts,
wars with light-sabers, wars with kerosene cans, and wars of historical
compensation. It is the latter set of wars that convey the force and menace of
Indian militarism, and the implications of the new obsession with ‘security.’
That word no longer refers to a serious concern with war between states, or
even to ‘defense,’ which does not require a military fetish. It refers, rather,
to an agenda of ethnic domination and authoritarianism. The greatest menace of
Indian militarism is the lynch mob continuously demarcating its borders, demanding
and often getting the help of the state in locking a minority into the role of
a foreign enemy.
In a society in
which nationalism has been a highly uneven phenomenon, meaning substantially
different things to elites, subalterns, provincials and emigrants, the idea of
the nation-at-war provides certain pleasures and reassurances: cohesion,
community, a modality of post-liberal citizenship and post-political
governance. It provides, moreover, a link between the nation one inhabits, the
state one does not confidently own, and the world one cannot fully inhabit.
Militarism welds together not only India and America, the neighborhood and the
border, but also the ‘strategic’ mentality of a Bose or Sarkar and the
provincial Hindu chauvinism of Narendra Modi. Both are authoritarian – and in
some regards, fascist – outlooks on power. But whereas the earlier militarism
came with the fantasy of a secular, modernizing state that might restrain and
retrain the mob, the other reflects a racist majoritarianism: the phenomenon of
the mob that wears the state as its badge.
Enshrouded as he
is in a fog of insults and honor, the dying soldier has finally accomplished something
that eluded Indian nationalists for a very long time: the production of the
citizen-soldier, whose homes, streets, schools and movie houses are all the
national border. This citizen-soldier is a fake, in the sense that unlike the
Israeli and even the American civilian, he (and increasingly, she) does not
expect to join the army. But since the border (or ‘Kashmir’) is now everywhere,
he too is constantly engaged in guarding it. Even a cow-protection gang or a lynch
mob killing a neighborhood Muslim (who, ironically, had a son in the military)
imagines itself to be the Indian Army, fighting its local Pakistan. Like its middle-class counterpart, it is uninterested in fighting anything else, or even in seeing a world beyond this omnipresent 'Pakistan.' In that sense, it is part of the same mob.
The consequences
of this militarism are, accordingly, both farcical and alarming. It is not
actually the case that the Indian state will go to war at any moment. Even
after the ‘cowardly terrorist’ incident at Uri, in which nearly twenty soldiers
were killed by four Pakistan-trained militants, the Indian armed response was
highly restrained: it consisted, at the most, of a shallow cross-border
commando operation. The Indian response to the Kargil incursion, too, was
marked by its restraint. What was not restrained was the cascade of moral
judgment (the ‘terrorists’ had to be ‘cowardly,’ lest the army be deemed
incompetent), and then the illiterate but quasi-American rhetoric of surgical
strikes, the gloating, and the display of public bellicosity. It is a
bellicosity that has both aided the state (that arrests and kills some people)
and been abetted by it (with the refusal to arrest or kill others). It has forced
the old-style military enthusiasts – who romanticized fighting machines and held
back from looking too closely at what the military was doing in Manipur and
Mizoram, but were nevertheless attached to a state that was secular, democratic
and inclusive – to share their platforms with the staggering coarseness of
those who see Muslims as the national enemy and racial inferiors. Indeed, the
former have yielded their platforms and their authority to the latter, and
increasingly there is no way to romanticize the Indian military without also
endorsing the rest of Indian militarism: Kashmir, AFSPA, mandatory patriotic
rituals, the beating and jailing of student activists, the cravenness of the
media, and of course the kerosene cans.
October 25, 2016
