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Muslims and armed forces

The contestation over the work of the Prime Minister's High Level Committee headed by Justice Rajindar Sachar is clearly overblown. Vested political interests, imprecise media reports, a reportedly peremptory style of enquiry by the Committee, and some over-reaction by the Army all seem to have played their part in this affair. The mandate of the Committee is to "prepare a report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India." In fulfilling this, it has gone about collecting, collating, and analysing information from diverse sources, including the Central and State governments, public sector undertakings, universities, the corporate sector, and the armed services. Since the basic purpose was to identify areas for government intervention, the Committee has been after numbers to crunch — particularly data on the proportion of Muslims in "public and private sector employment." The allegation that the Committee has attempted to `communalise' the armed forces by asking for the number of Muslims in the three wings is completely over the top. But the relevant question is not about the motive of the Committee or about its data quest, which is within its terms of reference. It is about its style of virtually demanding from the armed forces information on a sensitive matter. The Chief of Army Staff, General J.J. Singh, has responded, with all the emphasis at his command, to the effect that all Indians should get an "equal chance of joining the armed forces" and that enrolment must be based purely on "merit and the ability to perform the task that might be assigned." But, unlike the chiefs of the Air Force and the Navy, he seems to have misconstrued the implications of the queries about his wing's religious composition. Contrary to the initial assertions made by its chief of personnel, the Army does, it turns out, collect information on applicants' religious identity during the first stage of recruitment.

Merit and equal opportunity are relatively recent terms in the history and vocabulary of the Indian Army. That regiments would admit only those with similar religious, ethnic, and caste backgrounds was policy during British colonial rule. There was also a period when recruitment was limited largely to the so-called "martial races" — a pseudo-ethnological construction that divided Indians into those with "fighting" qualities and those without. The post-1949 ban on recruitment along caste, linguistic, and religious lines has produced positive results. The armed forces have become more heterogeneous in their composition. The exceptions are some Army regiments raised before Independence; they have been retained as `homogeneous' entities partly because of tradition and partly because of the belief they function cohesively and effectively. Unlike other civil services, the armed forces have no quotas for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. There is of course no question of communal reservation. But while anything divisive or diversionary must be avoided, there can be no denying the merit of expecting all institutions, including the armed forces, to become more diverse and more representative of the various constituent elements of India than they are today.

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