How India is removing the British-era concept of class from its armed forces

Months after the First World War began, the huge halls of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton were transformed into a hospital to treat the wounded Indian soldiers of the British army. The pavilion, which had once been the seaside pleasure palace of King George IV, put up new walls in order to cater for the deep-rooted biases present in India’s system of social hierarchy.

The pavilion had different wards, six separate kitchens catering for eight different diets, and designated areas for prayers and even funeral services. The wounded soldiers of different classes, religions and races received treatment from doctors and nurses of their own religion and caste – a stark illustration of the class-based divisions in the British Indian army.

During their 200-year rule in India, the British colonisers used, amplified and codified the existing caste system to divide the empire’s subjects and solidify their reign, with army regiments made up of single-caste class units – Sikhs and Gorkhas, for example. This system continued even after India won its independence in 1947, for while new regiments were to be formed without caste considerations, it was deemed too dangerous to enact root-and-branch reform while the newly formed nation faced multiple threats from hostile neighbours.

Now, after 75 years of independence, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has announced the biggest military overhaul in the country’s history, including a pledge to transition the world’s second-largest military to “all-India, all-class” recruitment in all regiments over a period of time.

The government unveiled the recruitment plan, dubbed “Agnipath” or “Path of fire”, saying it would modernise an ageing fighting force and bring it closer in line with the other leading militaries of the world. The plan will also save public money and tackle the mounting cost of army pensions, with most new recruits only given four-year contracts instead of what until now has essentially been a career for life.

The announcement in June triggered a wave of protests that escalated into riots, with widespread damage to public property and the loss of one life. The unrest was led by groups of “aspirants” – young men of recruitment age with hopes of joining the military – who railed against the idea of introducing a system of “corporate hire-and-fire” into the armed forces.

But while the change to short-term contracts drew the most attention, there is a great deal of scepticism within the armed forces community about how India can uproot the identity of its core regiments at a time when it has highly fraught border relations with both Pakistan and China.

Caste was not invented by the British in India, and Indian history books are replete with tales of the bravery of regiments of Marathas or Sikhs leading battles against invading Mughal and Afghan forces. “It was only formalised and organised during the British rule in India,” explains Dr Samraghni Bonnerjee, a British army historian at Northumbria University, “after they recognised that upholding these segregations would prevent a unified anti-British sentiment among them.”

British colonial recruitment processes at the time were guided by the primary principle of there being “martial races” – “that people from a certain region and/or caste were capable of bearing arms and others were not”, Dr Bonnerjee tells The Independent. British officials “categorised colonised subjects into imaginary attributes of those who were hyper-masculine” – and hence fit to join the armed forces – and those who were not, and would thus be better suited to administrative roles.

They were so successful at promoting these stereotypes that many exist to this day, Dr Bonnerjee argues, with the result that disrupting the system could have a profound effect on troop morale and cohesiveness. Would suddenly stripping away caste and ethnic segregation not also strip away the “warrior” martial identity of a Gorkha soldier, who is now free to join any regiment alongside a Sikh or a Tamil or a Bengali?

“A sweeping elimination will not address the core problem of prejudice [in Indian society] but rather create chaos in a system that, for hundreds of years, has built and thrived on segregation,” she says.

“Don’t fix what’s not broken,” says retired Lt Col JS Sodhi, who argues that regimentation according to religion and caste “has proved to be very effective and efficient”.

He says the new reforms will affect some of India’s most famous regiments and battalions with “fixed troop compositions”, including the Maratha Light Infantry, the Rajput Regiment, the Gorkha Rifles and the Sikh Light Infantry.

These units are the backbone of the military, and the element that will come into first direct contact with an enemy in the event of war. Lt Col Sodhi argues that such proven and important regiments – “which till date have been untouched ... since 1947” – should not be “tinkered with”.

Launching the Agnipath scheme on 14 June 2022, the chief of army staff Manoj Pandey said removing class-based hiring would “widen the recruitment base and provide equal opportunities to youth across the country to serve the system”.

“I believe our regimental system will evolve with greater national pan-India character. Gradually the class-based character of certain units and regiments that are of mixed composition today is expected to evolve into an all-India, all-class structure in the future,” he said.

However, amid the protests that followed, several statements by the defence leadership created a sense of ambiguity. Defence minister Rajnath Singh said: “The system, existing since the pre-independence era, is still the same. No change has been made. The old system is being continued.”

He was referring to the process in which candidates are required to submit certificates identifying their caste and religion – information that the army says is needed in order to correctly perform the last rites when soldiers are killed.

The implementation of reform within such a deeply ingrained system lacks clarity, says Sushant Sinha, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. “What is the rationale for doing it? What was broken that we are trying to fix here? Over the last eight years Mr Modi has been in power, I have only heard praises for the military,” he says.

A large number of old units have performed well, he adds. “[Their] ethos, the operating values, have emerged in a certain manner. Now you are fundamentally shifting that and uprooting it.

“Now it cannot be argued that the shift is bad in the 21st century. That’s how most modern armies operate. But have you given an alternative, a plan that is required in leadership, management, operational capabilities, and most importantly the changes required in the primary identity of a soldier: is he essentially a professional soldier who is an Indian, or is he part of a social milieu?” asks Mr Sinha.

The latter matters most, he suggests, because it is a key tenet of the honour code many Indian army soldiers aspire to, of naam, namak and nishan (honour, loyalty and identity).

Dilip Mandal, an author of books on sociology and the class divide in India, is among the social justice activists who have long debated the role of caste-based regiments in a modern, secular country.

But he also agrees that such a big change cannot be forced through without the support and involvement of the armed forces and society at large.

“It is a welcomed move, and the state should go ahead with this,” he tells The Independent.

“But it should be a process and not a decision. This can’t be imposed. The change should be from the bottom of society, which is still very much segregated. To initiate this change could be painful, but the transition should happen.”