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| Soldiers should be paid decently | | | | After a widely reported sense of hurt among the security forces on issue of salaries, the Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor recently clarified that there was no row with the political leadership. Although the armed forces enjoy tremendous popular esteem among all sections of the people, for as far as one can look back there has been unease in the services about the measure of official respect they actually command. The doubts pervade all ranks but may be said to be acute in the case of the officers. The problem is not just about pay and allowances, although these are not unimportant. The essential issue appears to be that in the forces an officer takes much longer to reach a certain grade — and therefore level of pay — than in the Class I civil service of the Government of India, and the police and the paramilitary services. Hidebound rules and traditions of the services have generally prevented them from taking up their cause with the ardour that civilians deploy when they have to press a demand. It is in this respect that the agitation in the services over the treatment meted out to them in the Sixth Pay Commission is different. Not satisfied with writing letters up and down the government hierarchy all the way up to the defence minister, the military brass thought it fit to take its grievances right up to the Prime Minister. Furthermore, it declared it won’t be accepting the dispensation the Sixth Pay Commission had set out for them. Quite rightly it was given a rap on the knuckles for doing this as the action amounted to stepping out of line. However, the government also moved in nuanced steps. It appointed a committee of three key ministers — Pranab Mukherjee, P. Chidambaram and A.K. Antony — to go into the specific grievances of the forces. This was necessary to keep the morale from flagging and in order not to create the impression that the government was unconcerned about the sentiment in the armed forces. As it is, the three services are these days failing to attract enough young men and women to fill the officer cadre, and the best in any case tend to plumb for the private sector. Giving the forces a fair deal is not the same as saying that the military should be set on the same pedestal as civilian authority. In a democracy, it is necessary to institutionalise the notion that the military is subservient to civilian power, at the heart of which is the elected government which runs the show with the aid of a permanent bureaucracy. This was indeed the case in the colonial era as well. Differences between Curzon and Kitchener are well known. No matter how grand Kitchener’s position in the imperial order, and not just in India, the viceroy was always made to prevail over him in the hierarchy. Nor for that matter is it the case of the forces that they should enjoy parity with the civilians in constitutional terms. This should be kept in view while considering their demands and concerns. |
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