The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: The Congress has again hit out against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) policy on contract soldiering, or Agniveer, which has done away with the regular job of soldiers and replaced them with soldiers on contract for four years.
The policy has been under fire with the Congress pledging to scrap it. The BJP too, otherwise adept at invoking the armed forces during electioneering, is not campaigning on it.
Col (retired) Rohit Chaudhry, chairman of the Congress’s ex-servicemen department, said, “Our forces are capable, are doing a great job and are protecting the country. But the Modi government has weakened the army by introducing the Agneepath scheme.” He said, “We are challenging the plan which is not in the interest of the country, the army and the soldiers. The former army chief, General M.M. Naravane, had also mentioned the Agneepath scheme in his book. He had written that the announcement of this scheme had surprised all the three wings of the armed forces as was something sent down by Modi and not proposed by them.”
Col Chaudhry held up a copy of the Model Code of Conduct, saying it explicitly allowed criticism of policies, and “Agniveer is a policy of the BJP government, not anything operational.” He said it was something Congress has consistently opposed and for some time now.
The issue has become a hot-button one, with the Election Commission (EC) asking the Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, after a set of complaints filed by the BJP against a poll speech of Congress’s ‘star campaigner’ Rahul Gandhi.
Controversially, without naming Gandhi or anyone else, the EC claimed that Gandhi’s reference to the Agniveer scheme flouts the Model Code of Conduct’s “specific prohibition against the use of armed forces for campaigning purposes”.
Congress leader P. Chidambaram said that the Election Commission is wrong “in directing the Congress party not to ‘politicise’ the Agniveer scheme”.
“What does ‘politicize’ mean? Does the ECI mean ‘criticise’?” he has asked on social media.
The Wire has a series on the unpopularity of Agniveer and the brewing unrest over it. You can read it here.