India: Military Budget 2013-14: Giant with Feet of Clay - South Asia Citizens Web
Manpower Augmentation
In 2000, army chief V P Malik announced 50,000 soldiers would be reduced over two years by not filling vacancies in non-combat jobs. No one even talks about this anymore. Much worse, in 2007, the CAG reported that 33,000 soldiers had been recruited above the authorised strength by the army, which claimed that it had erred in estimating "wastages" – retirements, desertions, failures in training, discharges on medical grounds, and deaths (Hindu, 26 May 2007). Now more than 89,000 men and 400 officers are to be recruited by the army to fill posts in the new Mountain Strike Corps, headquartered at Panagarh in West Bengal, to be deployed along the border with China, along with two mountain divisions that are being raised during the Twelfth Plan period. There are also reports about two armoured brigades being raised for Nathu La in Sikkim and Chusu in Ladakh, besides an infantry brigade for the middle sector, the Barahut plains of Uttarakhand. All this is at an estimated cost of Rs 65,000 crore, and does not include the two new infantry divisions raised in Lekhapani and Missamari in Assam in 2009-10.
The strength of the three services is now 1.3 million. If the one million in the central paramilitary forces (CPMFs) is added, the armed forces with 2.3 million accounts for nearly half of all central government employees, estimated to be 4.7 million in 2013 (which includes 1.3 million railway and 4,80,000 postal employees). Consider this to get an idea of the rapidity of employment generation in the armed forces – in 2012, the strength of CPMFs was 8,70,000, but it is slated to rise to one million in 2013. Compared to the Indian Railways (stagnant) or the postal department (marginal increase), the most employment generation in government services is taking place in the military sector. For example, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) had 1,500 personnel in 1962, 77,000 in 2012, and it will be 89,000 by 2015. Phenomenal growth indeed.
This has fiscal implications. At present, the estimated outgo on pay, allowances, and miscellaneous expenses of army, navy and air force personnel stands at Rs 63,037 crore out of the Rs 1,12,223 crore allocated to them. If we add the Rs"‚44,500 crore set aside for defence pensions, the wage bill for the three forces goes up to Rs 1,07,500 crore. Add to this the Rs 33,733.82 crore allocated to CPMFs, and 45% of the pension outgo of Rs 20,049 crore for central government employees (minus defence and railways), which works out to Rs 9,500 crore. We then see that the total wage and pension burden on the exchequer for the military sector is Rs 1,50,734 crore.
At least four corps of the Indian army, corps III and IV in the north-east and XV and XVI (the largest of them) in Jammu and Kashmir, are engaged in internal security operations. Eighty per cent of the nearly one million-strong CPMFs are deployed for internal duties. For instance, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has 85 battalions fighting Maoists and 62 battalions in Jammu and Kashmir. To put it another way, more than 50% of the armed forces are engaged, one way or another, in internal security. There are ways to prevent conflicts escalating into physical fights. And even if a fight breaks out, it is possible to prevent it from escalating through means other than military. Could exploring other options have prevented augmentation of the armed forces?
It is also known that every war zone in India sees a new force being raised. For instance, the situation in Jammu and Kashmir saw the emergence of the Rashtriya Rifles with more than 66 battalions. Now that militancy has abated if official accounts are to be believed, why have they not been disbanded? When left-wing extremism became the new internal security threat, a unit called Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) emerged within the CRPF as a special force to be used against the Maoists. Now the central government has a new plan of raising a Greyhound force in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha at a cost of Rs"‚750 crore over the next five years. Going by past practice, none of these new formations will be disbanded even if left-wing extremism ceases to be a big threat.
Tragically, there is a paucity of analysis of what it would mean if there was less military suppression and more political will to find democratic solutions to internal conflicts. As a result, we do not know how many lives or how much money the country could have saved, or what benefits would have accrued if the same resources had been used for more productive ends. It is striking that in India there is no peace movement worth its name campaigning for ending wars against our own people. There appears to be a preference for symbolic campaigns such as the one against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), which waters down the demand for its repeal with attempts to "humanise" it. But there is no campaign against the impunity enjoyed by the armed forces, which will remain even without the AFSPA. The links between wars at home and the AFSPA are also avoided.
If there were fewer battalions of CPMFs waging wars against our own people, there would be a lower wage bill and less loss of civilian and combatant lives. If the government pursues dialogue and a no-war agenda at home, people could find less reason to take to arms. Or if the state had ensured the prosecution of Hindutva activists right at the beginning, it would have undercut the appeal of fascist groups among both Hindus and Muslims. Hindutva formations would not have felt encouraged to carry on with their divisive game, and Muslim groups would not have been able to use victimhood as a justification for revenge. While we cannot turn the clock back, it is worth realising that a preoccupation with military suppression, strong-arm methods, and an unequal application of the law has undermined our constitutional democracy, and spawned a culture where hawks, jingoists, and chauvinists have a field day.
Be that as it may, as the armed forces gain in strength, they also stake claims for more power and pelf. It is no accident that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and CPMFs have demanded a 5% reservation for the children of all serving and retired personnel in government-run professional and technical institutions. As a spokesman put it,
We are raising this demand as part of welfare measures for Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) who are engaged in counter-insurgency and anti-Naxal duties across the country. It will help lift the morale of the personnel battling on internal security fronts. Efforts have been on from last year itself (Hindustan Times, 10 November 2012).
The CPMFs also want that every member who dies in action to be considered a shahid (martyr) and receive the same benefits that army personnel receive when they are either disabled or die in the line of duty. When the union government recently reduced the number of cooking gas cylinders for a family to six, the CPMFs protested and demanded that they be treated on a par with soldiers who get subsidised cooking gas. Their argument was, "We are also fighting a war" (Times of India, 2 November 2012).
Glorifying the ignoble wars against people provides a fig leaf for those who desire more money, authority and power. Thus the duplication of the work of the civil administration by the security forces, if not their replacement, in conflict areas is not fortuitous, but a sign of their growing clout.
