Agnipath burns the streets, scorches aspirations

In today’s India, the humour can only be dark. A scheme titled Agnipath (trail of fire) has left a trail of trains, buses, toll plazas, BJP offices and even, police stations destroyed by fire by angry young men across the country. The catchy nomenclature, based on the title of a Hindi poem by Harivansh Rai Bachchan, was seen as a public relations coup for the Modi government but events have taken an unfortunate and macabre turn since the short-term contractual recruitment scheme for the armed forces was announced on Tuesday.

These young men on the streets are an indication of what has become of our ‘demographic dividend’, the phrase touted often during the high noon of the Indian economy in the first decade of the new millennium. PM Narendra Modi boasts that the number of unicorns in India has reached 100-mark, with a valuation of more than Rs 25 lakh crore. As per Modi, these unicorns continue to create wealth and value, but these angry aspirants for wearing the military uniform clearly disagree.

Those angry with Agnipath instead see a country where wholesale inflation is at a three-decade high, rupee is at an all-time low, wages are stagnant, and wealth and income inequality are climbing. The official unemployment rate has been hovering around double digits, along with massive underemployment — farm jobs and self-employed categories disguise joblessness. All this when only less than half the people in working age are in the job market. In May, as per the latest RBI survey, 54.9% people said that the employment situation had currently worsened while 32.1% believed that it will further worsen after a year.

Read | Centre rolls out sops for 'Agniveers' to quell outrage against Agnipath scheme

The scenes of violent protests from across a dozen states are unsettling but unsurprising. They come at a time when the Indian State has ceded its monopoly over violence to Hindutva mobs. At times, it has actively encouraged these lawless mobs – through the use of bulldozers or repressive laws like the UAPA and Sedition – in furtherance of the ruling party’s ideology.

The angry young men on the streets have seen violence being successfully used as a tool for political mobilisation and consider arson a legitimate tool of political expression. The country’s top political leadership has been absent in even making a public appeal to the youth to shun violence by promising a patient hearing of their grievances. Military chiefs being paraded on television channels, to defend an unpopular political decision, have had no calming effect on the streets.

The decision to replace the longstanding recruitment method for the armed forces with the new Agnipath scheme was not taken by the military leadership. Indian Army’s official spokesperson had said in 2020 that the feedback from Army commands shows a general acceptance for such a scheme only on an experimental basis for around 1,000 vacancies of soldiers. “If successful, the vacancies can be increased later,” he said, in what would have been a pilot project. Last year, the late General Bipin Rawat, Chief of Defence Staff, expressed his reservations about the idea: “Equipping him and doing everything for him and then losing him after four years. Is it going to balance out? It will require a study.”

No such study has been carried out. Claims of extensive consultation fly in the face of the statement of Union minister and former army chief, Gen VK Singh (retd) who asserted that he had never been consulted.

Read | Centre cautions states amid protests against Agnipath

A government handout given to some journalists claimed that the proposal had been made by the Department of Military Officers – those sending that propaganda sheet did not even know that it is called the Department of Military Affairs. The Department, which has the CDS as its secretary, is itself headless for the last six months since Gen Rawat’s demise as the government has not deemed it important enough to fill this critical vacancy. Evidently, the Agniveer scheme was conceived and prepared at the highest political office and then rammed down the throats of the defence services. A two-year freeze on recruitment, using the pandemic as an excuse, was held as a proverbial gun to the head of the military to break its resistance.

Harsh reality

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s rhetorical flourish during Tuesday’s press briefing cannot obscure the harsh reality that this move is driven by a burgeoning pensions and salaries bill which the government can no longer afford. It is, in part, the price of politicising the military – this government came to power promising One Rank One Pension (OROP) and has placed the military on a very high nationalist pedestal during election campaigns. The political populism ruled out any honest move to fix the problems afflicting the armed forces.

The government’s motivations are evident from how these short-term contractual soldiers will not get any dearness allowance with their salaries and are denied gratuity by limiting their contract period to four years. By not counting their contract towards military service for those reinducted, the government has confirmed the exploitative nature of the scheme. Despite the Army being short of more than 100,000 soldiers, only 46,000 men are being contracted this year. This will not even make up for the soldiers retiring this year, further increasing the shortfall. But it will end up saving some money for a paisa-pinching government. It lays bare the mismatch between India’s great power ambitions and its not-so-great economic capacity.

Consequences

The consequences of this scheme are three-fold. At a military level, it will impinge upon the professional capabilities and operational effectiveness of our armed forces. Whether it be the technical training and experience required for the men who serve in the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy or the sub-unit and unit cohesion in the Army, the organisation will be challenged in utilising these short-term contractual soldiers who would be minimally trained. The process of reinducting only a quarter of those finishing their short-term contract would throw up further complications, challenging the ethos of the armed forces. The strong popular impulse for longer service and pension is likely to result in legal challenges at various stages of the scheme, and their public grievances are bound to be raised by political parties to pressure the government.

The political challenge comes from the return of regional, linguistic or ethnic imbalance in the armed forces due to the removal of state-wise recruitment targets based on a metric called the Recruitable Male Population or RMP for each state. A balanced military is considered essential for healthy civil-military relations in a democracy, and countries like Pakistan provide a warning about the dangers of an imbalanced army. When federalism is under threat from the unitary ideology of the BJP, this risk becomes even more widespread and intense.

The social challenge will emanate from the reintegration of these Agniveer into the society after their military contract is over. Devoid of the status of ex-servicemen and benefits of a pension, with no skills transferable to the civil street, they will depend on the “priority” in various government jobs being promised by the government.

This “priority” does not guarantee automatic induction into paramilitary forces or the state police, rendering them available as a major hiring pool for ideological groups and organisations that believe in violence. In a period of great political and social turmoil, when economic conditions are weak, its consequences are unimaginably scary.

George Orwell’s warning about the politics of language is manifest when words like reform, transformation and disruption are used to define this half-baked brainwave that has caused an upheaval in the military, polity, and society. This reckless move reeks of another disastrous initiative six years ago – of sudden midnight demonetisation. The Indian economy has not recovered from that massive shock. The military, dealing with live challenges on the country’s disputed borders with China and Pakistan, cannot afford a similar blow. India’s national security does not deserve to be consumed by this trail of fire called Agnipath.

(Sushant Singh is Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi)