Training alienates soldiers from the masses: Report

 

NEW DELHI: While the army authorities in New Delhi try to play down the attack on Kolkata’s Park Street police station, a senior military officer’s report positing an explanation for such incidents is being buried quietly.

 

The report was prepared by Vice-Admiral SCS Bangara, former chief of the navy’s training command and erstwhile commandant of the Khadakwasla-based National Defence Academy.

 

Bangara has delineated the flaws in training that contribute to the disagreeable army-civilian exchanges and examines the alienation polarising the two groups. He says most young Indian military officers are ignorant of their role in a democracy, have very little interaction with civilians, and harbour illusions of being superior to them.

 

“These days one often hears the term, ‘bloody civilians’, being used in a derogatory sense to distinguish between men in uniform and those out of it,” a part of the report says.

 

“At no stage of [the recruits’] early lives is the role of the military in a democracy discussed with them,” the report says. “Typically, we expect officers to become aware of these issues by themselves as they grow in the service.”

 

Although Bangara focused on the navy, he dwelt on the aspects of military training in India. His report says the Indian armed forces have adapted the Western way of military life, which creates a distinct insulation between defence personnel and civilians.

 

Over the years, the NDA and other training institutes have lost most of their civilian faculty. The civilians helped in building the character of young officers. They have been replaced by “by a floating population of men in uniform”, thus eliminating the primary contact between civilians and military.

 

Calling for Indianisation of the military-civilian interaction, Bangara’s report says, “It is necessary to increase our interaction with the outside world and harmonise it with our need to confine young trainees to closed-door military institutions.”

 

The report says audits of military training have remained localised and in-house: “[This], in my view, is unhealthy and not helpful,” Bangara says.

 

The NDA, where officers of all three services are trained, was broadly fashioned after West Point, the US military academy. While West Point’s training methods are regularly subjected to public scrutiny and improvement, NDA has almost stood still, the report says.

 

The present process of converting individuals into officers is rooted in past practices, which, the report says, often set up a clash between traditions instilled into the trainee and his own civilian background. “An interesting twist to this state of confusion in a young officer’s mind is the illusion that having been trained in an elite institution, he is vastly superior to his civilian counterpart.”