The military

Abstract

India has had a long and striking history of the military as an institution. This chapter aims to examine the relationship to contemporary political developments of the military as an institution. Military rule, militant or aggressive foreign policies, the militarization of society, the praise or emulation of so-called military values and virtues—all of these can be called “Militarism,” but they are really quite distinct phenomena. In British India the role of the military in politics was a live issue: it took that long for the British to conclude that civil-military relations in India were to follow the British pattern as closely as possible. A structural factor that has enhanced civilian control has been the large size and moderate sophistication of the Indian military. The resource base of the Indian military is bifurcated: while India's own ordnance factories produce many varieties of weapons, most of these have imported components, and many vital weapons are manufactured abroad.