Religious Identity In Armed Forces

The answers are not easy. So lets start an open debate to address the issue in civil society apart from order in the court.

An Indian Air Force NCO had challenged the IAF order of 2003 not allowing Muslims serving in the IAF to keep beards. Prior to that, Muslims serving in the IAF could do it with the sanction of a senior authority. This is what the Indian government has told the Supreme Court now.
"All Air Force personnel, while on duty, are required to wear similar uniform and do not display any sign or object which marks him distinct from others. In an armed force, it is always intended that to the extent possible, all personnel should look identifiably similar so that they may work in a cohesive, co-operative and co-ordinate manner" The Indian Express 18 Jan'2009.
The reasoning sounds pretty cogent and the principle of a distinct religious identity in uniform should be followed across the board, without any exceptions. The problem in executing that order in the IAF lies with practitioners of Sikhism.

According to Cplash ( A Citizen Journalism Site)
"In this connection, it may be mentioned that when IAF is allowing its Sikh personnel to grow long hair and beard as it is in keeping with the injunctions of the Sikh religion, it must not disallow its Muslim personnel from keeping beard as it is enjoined upon the Muslims by Sunnah and Hadith to keep beard. The IAF can in no case be discriminatory against the Muslims. It has either to ask its Sikh personnel also to shave off their long hair and beard or else it must allow Muslims to grow a beard. That would meet the ends of the justice. Moreover, I think that IAF is allowing its Muslim personnel to have upto four living wives. So, it is not totally free of religion as it claims.
The Additional Solicitor General had earlier provided the argument that would make it difficult for the IAF to keep the Sikhs out of the scope of this new order.


The government is bound to respect religious freedom. But there is an overdriving concept of public interest when one is working in the Armed Forces. Can one sport a beard as an act of distinctiveness when the person is expected to work in an environment of cohesiveness ? The pursuit of faith is not abrogated, but standing out is what concerns the forces.
Should a personnel deserve his identity as a matter of duty or his faith? The State is free of any religion. Those who have already entered service and are keeping a beard, we are not stopping them. But for fresh recruits, we are applying a uniform rule. TOI says.
France had earlier faced much turmoil when banned all conspicuous religious symbols from state schools– Islamic headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, Sikh turbans and large Christian crosses — in 2004. The separation of state from religion has been a debatable issue in all pluralist, democratic societies and India is no exception.


I admit limited knowledge of various religions and their symbols, but one principle clearly seems right for the Indian Armed Forces — No visible symbols of distinctiveness should be allowed in uniform. But that brings into debate the tricky issue of the Sikh community, which has been a mainstay of the Indian Armed Forces for centuries now. It has worn its own distinctive symbols, which have not hampered their outstanding performance as military personnel. And if Islam is under the spotlight today because of its association with terror, then Sikhism has had its own brush with terror. It even led to mutiny by some serving Sikh soldiers after Operation Blue Star in 1984.
There are no simple solutions to this vexed question. History, tradition, freedom of pursuing religion (as deemed fit by an individual) versus public service norms, secularism (separation of religion from the state) and efficiency of the Armed Fforces. This needs to be vigorously debated.
Perhaps, a note similar to the note issued by Council of Europe on wearing of religious symbols in public areas needs to be brought out in the Indian context as a starting point for the debate. It is not only Europe, even the United States is struggling with restriction on displaying religious symbols in military cemeteries.
We hope that the Indian society and polity is mature enough to debate such fundamental issues in a healthy and frank manner. Or is the nation better keeping a controversy at bay by letting the court make its pronouncements on the subject.
Your thought provoking suggestions are the need of the hour so as not to let this issue be the another in the queues of controversies we have a record of.

On Fifteenth General Elections...

One of the favourite anecdotes of Ramchandra Guha about Indian democracy and elections.
In the first weeks of 1967, the Times of London dispatched a reporter to cover the Indian elections. Travelling around the country, he saw - or thought he saw - a mood of apathy and helplessness. Some Indians he talked to had expressed a “readiness for the rejection of parliamentary democracy”.
The journalist himself was dismayed by the conflict and the corruption. He could spy “the already fraying fabric of the nation itself”, with the states “already beginning to act like sub-nations”.

He concluded that “the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed”. Indians would thus soon vote in “the fourth - and surely last - general election”.

Well, that prophet of doom has been proved wrong and India is upon its fifteenth general elections now. It is incumbent upon all eligible Indians to go forth and vote.

Voting is our right and we must exercise it or should stop wailing for Sampoorna Kranti as we have discussed in previous blogs. We have got one of those workable options which can make a difference if we avail them.

Voting is Hazardous Activity

Political parties in India who have delivered high economic growth have lost elections in the past.
Predicting election outcomes in India is a hazardous activity; inferring them from economic performance is even more hazardous.
Going by per-capita income growth, one would predict a resounding victory for the ruling Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
At 7.4%, per-capita income growth during the first four years of the UPA rule has been by far the highest of any four-year period in India's post-independence history.
Yet, if the electorate goes by the contribution the present government has made to the accelerated growth in incomes, it would hand the latter its worst defeat. The UPA government has perhaps done the least of all governments since the 1991 Narasimha Rao-led Congress administration to advance economic reforms.
The government of Mr Rao, which came to power in June 1991, is credited with launching the most far-reaching and systematic economic reforms. The reforms not only stabilised the economy following the 1991 balance of payments crisis, they also delivered the hefty 6.5% per annum growth during the last three years of his tenure.
Yet, he lost the 1996 election.
In a similar vein, led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP-led NDA government undertook massive reforms in virtually all areas of economic activity during its tenure from 1998 to 2004. Those reforms made a significant contribution to the shift in India's growth rate to the current 8% to 9% growth trajectory. In the last fiscal year of the NDA government, 2003-04, the economy grew 8.5%.
Yet, the NDA government lost power to the UPA.

Today, Congress has only 153 of the 272 seats it needs for a majority in parliament. The UPA consists of 11 parties and still needs the outside support of half a dozen other parties to achieve a majority.
A dramatic example of the importance of coalition politics is provided by the role played by the southern regional party, the DMK, in 2004. It had been with the NDA in the 1999 election but switched allegiance to the UPA in the 2004 election. Its 16 seats, subtracted from the NDA and added to the UPA, provided the balance of votes the UPA needed to from the government.


In recent years, voters have returned state governments to power only when the latter have provided decisively good management and delivered perceptible improvement in living standards. Therefore, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat represent a handful of the cases in which the electorate returned the incumbent governments back to power.


The key factor behind the change in voter attitude was the "revolution of rising expectations" unleashed by the reforms and the resulting growth acceleration.
In most cases, the electorate has handed punishing defeats to incumbents even if it has meant replacing them with another equally incompetent government. the voter remained in the grip of fatalism: kya karen, bhagwan ki marzi hai, but once reforms showed him that change was possible and that poverty was not God's will, he became more demanding. If the incumbent won't deliver fast enough, he would try someone else.
Moral of the story is : "All politics is local" as said by former US House Speaker Tip O'Neal. So is it in India. Within a week's time all the voters are going to try next set of Politicians with another set of Principles and it is rightly remarked that the "Government is basically chosen by all those educated and civilized citizens who do not vote, in addition to all those who mere exercise their right to vote".

Lieutenant is lieu-tenant

An interesting bit of information about the starting officer rank in the Indian army from the OUP Blog..

…the word lieutenant. The word arrived in English from French in 1375 and within 100 years the English were pronouncing it “left-tenant” as if there were a “right-tenant” as well. Yet the spelling that influences Americans to say “loo-tenant” survived this pronunciation change back in the old country and also shows us in stark clarity where the word comes from.
If you write lieutenant out, but put a space after lieu, the result is two other common English words.
Lieu might have a bit of a legalistic flavor to it but most people recognize that it means “instead of” or “in place of”—for example: “in lieu of paying me the money, she took me out to dinner.”
Of course a tenant is someone who rents an apartment. They hold the lease on the place and if it’s a nice apartment, in a desirable neighborhood, they might hold onto it tenaciously.From Latin then, lieutenant literally means “place holder” and the military lieutenant acts on behalf of—or in place of—their commanding officer.