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ABSTRACT
In June 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency rule, capping off a decade long process of the ‘deinstitutionalisation’ of the founding Congress party, increased social mobilisation, and political instability – factors generally considered conducive to military intervention in politics. Organisational factors encouraging military praetorianism, such as military involvement in internal security missions and the growth of ‘rival’ paramilitary institutions, accompanied this process of political decay. But the Indian military did not exploit this window of opportunity. This article offers an institutionalist explanation of the military’s political restraint based on two factors. First, institutionalised mechanisms of civilian control, forged during the critical juncture following independence, insulated the military from politics and the politicians from the military despite the weakening of the political system under which these were created. Second, military internalisation of the norm civilian supremacy, continually reinforced via professional socialisation processes, acted as an internal barrier to military role expansion.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Alfred Stepan, Amit Ahuja, Bushra Asif, Stephen P. Cohen, Philip Oldenburg and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Article 352 states,
if the President is satisfied that a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India or of any part of the territory thereof is threatened, whether by war or external aggression or armed rebellion, he may, by Proclamation, made a declaration to that effect in respect of the whole of India or of such part of the territory thereof as may be specified in the Proclamation.
2 The immediate factors behind the emergency included Gandhi's conviction by the Allahabad High Court for campaign malpractices in the 1971 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress party's defeat to the opposition in Gujrat, and opposition agitation designed to overthrow her government (Hewitt, Citation2010, p. 16, see also Dhar, Citation2000).
3 For instance, the 42nd Constitutional amendment provided for the dispatch of federally controlled security forces to states without their prior consultation, and empowered parliament to make laws for a state if the security of India was threatened by activities in the state (Austin, Citation2003, p. 373).
4 The 1971 Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) enacted during the Bangladesh war, was amended to provide security forces the powers to detain suspects without disclosing the grounds for detention and to deny detainees the right to judicial appeal. Over 100,000 people, including top opposition leaders, were arrested under MISA and other preventive detention laws (Misra, Citation1980, p. 380).
5 On the night of the emergency, a government instituted electric blackout prevented many of Delhi's newspapers from reporting on the development. The next day, 26th June, the Home Ministry issued an order to impose censorship (Austin, Citation2003).
6 The 42nd amendment barred the judicial scrutiny of ‘constitutional amendments in any court on any ground’, allowed parliament to extend its own tenure, and gave parliament virtually unlimited powers to amend the constitution (see Austin, Citation2003).
7 The generally held view is that PM Gandhi's decision was driven by her belief, fed by intelligence reports and party sychophants, that she would win the election. Her Principal Secretary, P.N. Dhar, offers a different explanation: she had become ‘uncomfortable' with the Emergency and wanted to ‘get out.’ See Dhar (Citation2000, pp. 350–351).
8 Pull and push correspond with the distinction made in the literature on military politics between opportunity and motive, or structure and agency (see Finer, Citation1962; Thompson, Citation1975).
9 Random sampling was impractical due to time, resource and security constraints. Hence, I collected a convenience “snowball” sample to build a diverse population of interviewees. Snowball sampling is a method in which initial contacts provide referrals to new ones, and so on. On the nature and methods of snowball sampling, see Berg (Citation1988), Flint and Atkinson (Citation2001), Vogt (Citation2005).
10 I conducted these semi-structured interviews during a three-month field trip to India in the summer of 2009. I chose semi-structured interviewing for two reasons. First, in contrast to unstructured interviewing, it allows the researcher to ask all the respondents a set of questions focused on the theoretical concerns of the research project. Second, the researcher can probe the respondents with follow up questions to gain as much relevant information about specific themes and issues as possible. For more on the nature and techniques of semi-structured interviews, see Vildawsky (Citation2010, pp. 57–99).
11 The party split in 1969 into two factions when Indira Gandhi clashed with the Party Syndicate (state party bosses who had appointed her to head the party) over the nomination of the party's candidate for presidential office. Gandhi's Congress (R-Requisition) lost 40 per cent of its organizational strength compared to the pre-split Congress party (Frankel, Citation2009).
12 These are the ‘Northern’, ‘Western’, ‘Central’, ‘Eastern’, ‘South Western’ and ‘Southern’, as well as a training command.
13 In 1955, the post of the C-in-C was abolished altogether and was replaced with a chief of staff for each of the three services, thus equalizing the status of the service chiefs and making each of them individually accountable to the government.
14 The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958, amended subsequently) enables the Union government to declare a state or a part thereof as a ‘disturbed area’. The Act gives army officers special powers of arrest, searches as well as the use of force without authorization by a civilian magistrate, otherwise mandatory in ‘aid to the civil power’ operations. Officers also enjoy immunity from prosecution for their actions. Retrieved from http://nagapol.gov.in/PDF/The%20Armed%20Forces%20Special%20Powers%20Act%201958.pdf
15 The other key members of the DCC were the deputy prime minister and the ministers for defence, home affairs and finance. Military service chiefs, the secretary of the MoD and the financial adviser (defence and supply) were to be ‘in attendance’ at every meeting. See Government of India, ‘Memorandum on Committees Dealing with Matters Affecting the Three Armed Forces’ 20 December 1947, File 245, Mountbatten Papers, NMML, New Delhi.
16 As India's first defence secretary, H.M. Patel, summed up the situation: ‘The Service Chiefs seem to have concluded that they can only deal direct with the Defence Minister. This was manifested in their decision not to even send to me the agenda of the Chiefs of Staff Meetings’. See H.M. Patel to General Sir Roy Bucher (retd.), 2 February 1950. File No. 1979-01-87- 32, Bucher Papers, National Army Museum, London.
17 For an excellent revisionist account of the war that illustrates the military leadership's strategic miscalculations and faulty war planning, see Raghavan (Citation2009).