The military’s ‘free hand’ is a smokescreen, don’t fall for it
The Indian leaders often flaunt giving a “free hand” to their military. This free hand was given after terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir’s Uri and Pulwama, and most recently in Ladakh. There was a cross-border “surgical strike” post-Uri in the Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and an airstrike in Pakistan-proper post-Pulwama. The Ladakh situation is still evolving but reports do suggest that the Indian military is no longer standing down.
The military and the bureaucracy has been the face of these moments. The then Director General of Military Operations of the Indian Army announced the 2016 surgical strike whereas the post-Pulwama airstrike was announced by the then foreign secretary. The army commander under whose area of responsibility Ladakh falls was the main face of the negotiations for much of the ongoing episode with the Chinese, even though diplomatic and political engagements have also been there at top levels.
While the government may hail these acts (2016 surgical strike, 2019 airstrike, Ladakh maneuvers) as a result of a “free hand” to the military, there is no doubt these acts were sanctioned from the very top of the political executive. Yet these “paradigm-changing” moves have been unable to deter Pakistan that has continued its misadventures in one way or the other and has continued to incur substantial costs on the Indians. About China, it is too early to come to a conclusion as it’s an ongoing episode.
The “free hand” from the political executive is apparently rooted in their trust in the country’s military. The executive tends to believe, and make the public believe, that the military knows how to ensure security, territorial integrity, and incur punishment on the aggressors. This “free hand”, or an autonomy, is portrayed as a sense of operational independence free of political interference.
The reason is very endemic to India. In India, political interference in state institutions is deemed a problem (an example is how governments use investigative agencies to hound rivals) and the military is respected by the public — so giving the military a free hand, an autonomy, and portraying non-interference in its affairs gives sanctity to the military and the political executive.
This autonomy, independence, or political non-interference, whichever way one might phrase it, leads to the military being isolated from the political executive and the larger scheme of things but this does not seem to be a concern for the leadership — either civilian or military.
On the contrary, it’s a symbiotic arrangement in which both sides gain — the civilian leadership escapes scrutiny and gets a proxy as a face of crisis management whereas the military gets to operate in an unsupervised, autonomous manner and it also escapes scrutiny or accountability for lapses, for the Indians may criticise their government but they may not criticise their military.
Speaking to The Dispatch, Arzan Tarapore, a research scholar at Stanford University, agrees with the understanding of the “free hand” being mutually beneficial, but he cautions that this is not a recent phenomenon. He says, “It dates back to post-1962 [India-China War] reforms. There are entrenched interests that are dedicated to maintaining the status quo.”
In a recent paper published by Carnegie India, Tarapore highlighted that the Indian Army’s doctrine needs to be reworked as it does not reflect the challenges of the present times. The outdated doctrine risks the army to become irrelevant as an instrument of national power, emphasised Tarapore, and wrote that the autonomous functioning of the Indian Army in particular, and of the larger defence policy in general, has led to an arrangement in which the military has over the years ended up operating without being in line with the larger strategic context.
There are initial signs that there is an attempt at course correction in this regard. Tarapore says, “The appointment of the Chief of Defence Staff is a step in the right direction. He is seen as bridging the civil-military divide, as can be seen by General Bipin Rawat’s application of Aatmanirbhar Bharat to defence. But this is only one small step and it will not stop the systemic problem by itself.”
Last few years of the Narendra Modi government have seen some degree of understanding between the civilian and military leadership that began to show when Gen. Rawat was the army chief. He initiated internal restructuring of the army with integrated battle groups’ formations. Now he is at the helm of inducing jointness in the military, a mandate handed to him by the political executive that appointed him as CDS.
Tarapore cautions, “It’s important to remember that jointness will take a long time — decades — to be implemented. Even in advanced “joint” militaries, it’s constantly an aspirational goal rather than an achieved destination. For someone like CDS, the issue is not only of doctrine, but also cost and opportunity cost — as it should be.”
It’s not just the government, the military, or the uninitiated public that falls for this “free hand” approach. During the ongoing India-China episode, a well-known English magazine published an issue titled “Options before the army”. It’s as if the army is one deciding the course of action! This is also a tell-tale of the army-centric thinking that dominates the Indians that Tarapore touched in his paper. Among his recommendations in his Carnegie paper that he calls “modest”, he wrote that the army should start thinking of itself as an element of a larger joint force.
Speaking to The Dispatch, he says, “The real tests of jointness will be how joint commands are introduced and whether officers from the air force and the navy get to command army troops. It is also to be seen how the services reconcile and rationalise their acquisitions and whether they come up with truly joint plans.”
About his “modest” recommendations, he says, “I avoid a call for a grand reform that spans the government and the military. If committees after committees have not succeeded in getting those reforms, I doubt if I can. So my intent was to propose much more modest reforms that can be undertaken within the army.”
The ongoing situation with the Chinese is being managed carefully from the very top. The National Security Advisor-headed China Study Group was believed to be managing the earlier army commanders’ negotiations and now the politicians have entered the fray too with the defence and foreign ministers holding talks with their Chinese counterparts. There is neither a “free hand” nor is there apparently a plan to give one. If a “free hand” is indeed given, then one misstep from a tactical commander may very well spiral into a situation with larger strategic or even worldwide ramifications.
Lt. Gen. (Retired) Prakash Menon notes in an article for ThePrint that “the military does not and should not have a ‘free hand’ [at the top decision-making level] for their role is instrumental. Giving a ‘free hand’ to the armed forces when one is dealing with a nuclear power cannot be acceptable from a national security perspective.”
Gen. Menon, a former military adviser in the National Security Council Secretariat and presently the director of Strategic Studies Programme at the Takshashila Institution, adds, “On the contrary, deeper political guidance and oversight are imperative while dealing with another nuclear power. Such political oversight is required during planning and execution stages of the retaliatory actions. In practice, it entails greater civil-military interaction, and not a ‘free hand’.”
Gen. Menon wrote this in the context of Pakistan (post-Pulwama) but this can be considered with regard to China as well, as even with the rhetoric of a free hand, the civilian leadership is at the helm of the initiative.
So while the free hand is more rhetoric than policy in context of the ongoing episode with China, it does seem to be there in the larger policy of the political executive where they tend to seem to give autonomy to the military as Tarapore’s paper argues. In Kashmir too, the political executive seems to believe, and make the public believe, that the army knows how to deal with the situation and hence they have more trust in the militaristic approach than in a political initiative.
In such a scenario, one does need to ask what happens when the public has been fed ideas of “free hand” and eye-for-eye punitive action so much that it cannot be satisfied with anything less? The populist political executive sanctioned a cross border army operation post-Uri and an airstrike post-Pulwama and yet the Pakistan-sponsored terror continued.
The populist political executive ultimately serves the public that has been conditioned to ideas of “free hand” and punitive action. What if there comes a point when they are not in a position to act militarily or when the military is not in a position to carry out a punitive act but the public pressure to which the political executive succumbs every now and then dictates one? Either the populists will take a misstep or there will be a national loss of face.
The political executive and the military ought to go beyond mutually beneficial “free hand” arrangements and work towards a system that gives primacy to the challenges of the present times rather than serve self-sustaining goals of winning elections on populism and running an unsupervised military.
Madhur Sharma is a post-graduate in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, and a graduate in history from the Delhi University. He tweets at @madhur_mrt.
