As per a report on Timesnownews, the Indian Army has announced a new recruitment model on a pilot basis that will allow civilians to serve within its ranks on a three year short service 'Tour of Duty'.
Here is the link to that article.
A day after the announcement, the Print has published an opinion piece by retired Major General B S Dhanoa where the model was criticized by the Major General as a 'harebrained idea'. It spoke about putting young minds in a serious situation of real shells
and bullets without enough training, questioned the peer support of the regular
soldiers that these tourist soldiers would receive, and the possibility of political tourists getting into the ranks of the Armed Forces polluting the apolitical nature of the Armed Forces.
Here is the link to that article by B S Dhanoa.
Apart from the points mentioned in the article attached, , I would like to add a serious fallacy guiding this idea.The ‘tour of duty’ assumes a very flawed concept of ‘duty to the nation'. It assumes that army is the only duty worth for a true Indian. It indirectly signifies that farming, orphan care, old age care, teacher, professor, police duty, construction workers etc are not duties to the nation. It forgets that the pain of a death of a soldier is equal to the pain of a death of a farmer or a police officer.
Do forgive me for selecting these duties among many others as examples, for I wanted to create an impact to bring home the point. The idea reeks of an appeal to the jingoistic hot young blood of the youths to fill the forces with low cost human resource.
The second point that I want to highlight is a bit shameful one, and a more serious one. One of the points put forward in support of the idea is that the army won’t have to pay them much. There will be no liability of pension and other benefits.Currently, the pension bill is almost 30% of the total defense budgets (I doubt it but that is the number the timesnow article quotes) and so this idea will save cost for the nation. This rationale given for the 'tour of duty' idea is a problem.
Firstly, a Govt that wins UP elections by taking help of the Army in their political hoardings and regularly invokes the prestige of the army for effect, is now being stingy to increase defense budgets for these young boys who would guard the real borders with real rifles facing real bullets. It only brings out the true 'bania' face of the Govt that it only increases its election budgets. All other budgets can be slashed even at the cost of real lives.
Secondly, if we want the young minds of India to taste the discipline of the forces for a time so that they can become better disciplined citizens then why are we not allocating extra budgets for such a novel idea. If the novel idea is to get cheap untrained army soldiers facing real bullets then it is indeed a very cunning self centered idea. It is against the cost of life of a citizen. It is against the citizens.
I would urge the Govt to consider defense decisions strategically from a long term point of view, with a clear vision to keep it as apolitical as possible. If we need more human resources, we need to either streamline operations and save operations cost, or increase budget to hire and train the additional human resources.
This Govt from 2014 has been very particularly visible in terms of taking thoughtless, knee jerk decisions. The worst was the PM saying ‘no Chinese inside India’, the worse was the ‘lock down in 4 hours’ killings 100s and bad was the sudden demonetization killing the entire economy to get it back to an even bigger cash economy!! Then you have the farm bills, removal of 370, breaking J&K into UTs, make in India ventilators, and the 21 day ultimatum to Covid 19 by the PM; and the list is endless.
I am just aghast at the number of stupidities that India has been so proudly executing in the last 6 years. Oh my India.
