New Delhi: The controversy over replacing the oil painting depicting Pakistan’s surrender in the 1971 war in the Indian Army (IA) chief’s office lounge in South Block with a ‘semi-mythological’ artwork inspired by the Mahabharata is of a piece with numerous other continuing historic, cultural and tradition changes being governmentally foisted upon India’s armed forces.
The substitute ‘Karam Kshetra’ or Field of Deeds painting by an IA officer melds mythological and modern elements like Lord Krishna’s chariot with Arjuna, Garuda and Chanakya with tanks, helicopters and all-terrain vehicles, locating them all on the banks of the Pangong lake in eastern Ladakh, in an obvious politically hued portrayal lost on no-one.
The intuitive response of veterans who participated in the 1971 operations on the eastern and western fronts to this switch was one of outrage and indignation, railing against the Hindu nationalist BJP government’s propagation of mythology, religion and folklore even in military matters, but without directly naming it.
The majority of veterans reacted anonymously to the painting’s removal, fearing adverse official reaction and consequent endangerment of their pension payments if they identified themselves.
However, their ire was equally, if not more intensely, addressed to the ‘culpability and complicity’ of the IA’s top brass in facilitating the removal of the iconic painting extolling independent India’s first epochal military victory.
They also privately fumed over the furtive and stealthy manner in replacing the painting and attributed it to the Faustian bargain between soldiers and politicians which had proliferated in recent years for reciprocal benefit.
It is no longer a secret that many services personnel had, over the past decade, been increasingly identifying themselves with successive BJP-led administrations which, in turn, had periodically exploited periodic military achievements for political gain.
The celebrated contentious painting, meanwhile, has been relocated to the Manekshaw Centre in Dhaula Kuan, a massive conference hall named after India’s first field marshal. As IA chief, Manekshaw was instrumental in India definitively defeating Pakistan militarily in 1971 and in fostering a new nation – Bangladesh – a feat which even the US military, with all its might and wizardry, did not achieve.
Also read: Removing 1971 War Surrender Picture Reflects Poorly on India’s Military Leadership
The IA’s justification for moving the painting here is that it would be seen by many more people and not just by VIPs received in the IA chief’s South Block lounge.
Nevertheless, replacing the emblematic painting is merely a continuation of the steady mythologising of the country’s miliary which the Union government and the compliant Services, especially the IA, have dubbed as ”de-colonisation”.
In October 2023, for instance, defence minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated Operation Udbhav (Evolution) for the IA to study ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts from the 4th century BCE to the 8th century to “rediscover” India’s rich heritage in “statecraft, warcraft, diplomacy and grand strategy” in order to operationally implement them all in the prevailing regional nuclear weapons environment.
According to the Press Information Bureau (PIB), Udbhav, initiated jointly by the IA and the United Service Institution of India or USI think tank in New Delhi, is focused on a “broad spectrum” that included the writings of Kautilya (Arthashastra), the post-Mauryan Kamandaka (Nitisara) and those of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar (Tirukkural).
The PIB stated that this was an attempt to “bridge the historical [concepts] and the contemporary” and to “integrate age-old wisdom with modern military pedagogy”.
A cross-section of service veterans, however, at the time and even now, disagree with formalising and sanctifying Udbhav.
“Warfare has changed so much over several millennia that ancient weaponry, tactics and military planning have little or no relevance in today’s techno-heavy battlefield as depicted in the substitute painting in the IA chief’s office lounge,” said a retired two-star IA officer.
Besides, in the absence of even a fundamental National Security Strategy, the study of strategic and tactical warfare in ancient texts, however deep and seminal, makes little sense for India’s armed forces, he stated.
Even Kautilya’s Arthashastra, declared the former cavalry officer, decreed the equivalent of an NSS, arguing that all rulers needed to ascertain that their armies were not, in any way, endangered for lack of strategic guidance and direction.
Another two-star IA officer said that ancient wisdom should not be sought to tackle modern-day contingencies, even if their study brings solace to the restlessness in our mind to try and decipher what our ancestors opted to do on the battlefield in a long-gone epoch. This fascination with the study of ancient texts, he declared, was at best an academic exercise in self-pride.
Besides, the “dulcet tones” of ancient poetry should not “seduce” people into believing that what had so far been practised in planning and executing Indian military strategy was “sub-par and irrelevant or relegated to a distant memory with rediscovered ancient wisdom”. Moreover, he added, also declining to be named, nothing could be further from the truth in this framing of modern-day military strategy.
Also read: What India’s Military Is Taking From ‘Ancient Traditions’ – and What it Should Be Learning Instead
Another former senior defence ministry official concurred. He maintained that Udbhav was an attempt at “excavating the past” in an era of network centricity and artificial intelligence.
“There is an attempt at glorying the past with little attempt to rectify the myriad inefficiencies in modernising the military, as shown in the painting,” he stated, also declining to be named.
Udbhav is part of the Indian military’s wider attempt at “de-colonisation” in the Amrit Kaal era till 2047, as recently decreed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This undertaking encompasses shedding most, if not all its links, traditions and customs with the colonial-era, from which it is descended, to emerge as an atmanirbhar or wholly indigenous force in thought, form, look and content.
This latter was a goal senior military officers from all three services were zealously and unthinkingly pursuing currently, much to the chagrin of a generation of veterans, who expressed despair and gloom over such efforts.
The IA evolved under the East India Company, and later the British government in the 18th and 19th centuries, whilst the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) and the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) came into being in 1934 and 1932 respectively, becoming the IN and the IAF after independence.
Understandably, all three embraced and, over decades, perpetuated many of their progenitors’ customs, conventions and practices which, analysts unanimously agreed, comprised the fundamentals of most of the world’s militaries and served to perpetuate their elan and josh (fervour).
But radical change is in the offing.
Last year the IA’s adjutant’s general branch embarked, on government directions, to begin ending “archaic and antiquated” colonial traditions, dress codes, pipe and drum bands, colour presentations and investiture ceremonies.
The affiliation of units with those in foreign armies it had fought alongside in the two World Wars, and caste and ethnically specific regiments raised by the British like Sikh, Gurkha, Jat and Rajput amongst a myriad others, were also likely to be discontinued for their colonial overhang, replaced under the Agnipath scheme by part-time All-India All-Class Agniveers.
Even national security adviser Ajit Doval in an interview in mid-2022 to India Today TV railed against the IA’s colonial traditions which, he said, compared unfavourably with the nationalistic Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army (INA), raised by freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose in 1942 to fight the British in Burma during WW2 under Japanese command.
The 70,000-strong INA, comprising prisoners of war, Doval said, was like no other and had sacrificed 40,000 personnel. The INA, he had then castigatingly declared, were true “soldiers of India”, organised into regiments named after Mahatma Gandhi and Rani Jhansi, unlike those in the IA which were primarily British in origin and structure.
It remains to be seen whether the IA will be resilient enough or not to weather the multi-front campaign of mythology, religion and folklore underway to transform it.
