| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The civil-military equation has been assigned great significance in the national security matrix, and experts consider that nations that fail to evolve a stable paradigm of civil-military relations squander their resources and run grave security risks. In India, this issue has failed to receive the importance it deserves because of the general indifference of the politicians to national security affairs on one hand, and the vested interest of the bureaucracy in maintaining the status quo on the other. It is believed that civil-military relations constitute a zero-sum game in which "civilian control" is retained by reducing the power of the military vis-à-vis the civilians. An irrational but subliminal fear of the military has led the Indian politicians to skew the civil-military equation in favour of the bureaucracy and, in a paradigm unique to India, to place the military under their control. Pointing to the military's sense of grievance and the vitiated atmosphere that prevails in the Ministry of Defence, the author reflects on the price being paid by the nation for endemic "civil-military dissonance" in terms of major national-security shortcomings, as well as the damage being inflicted on the institution of our armed forces.
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