The age-old proposition that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ seemed to have escaped both the government and the military leadership when they introduced the Agnipath scheme with much fanfare in June 2022 – presenting it as a radical new model for recruiting personnel below officer rank (PBOR) for limited tours of duty across all three services.After years of criticism, the scheme was substantially recast last week. Predictably, the U-turn was presented as yet another major military reform amid the usual media platitudes – even though its latest provisions bring it much closer to the established recruitment arrangements it was designed to replace.Agnipath’s original objectives were to create a younger military, reduce the mounting pension burden, which accounted for a substantial share of the annual defence budget, and accelerate the armed forces modernisation. But the entire enterprise seems to have come almost full circle, reverting to the old system of PBOR recruitment, albeit incorporating many more complications, qualifications and bureaucratic jalebis, all of which remain unexplained.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.However, few in the military, serving or retired, are mourning this retreat from the original Agnipath plan, whose revision was announced on November 4 by Chief of Defence Staff General N.S. Raja Subramani.Under the altered arrangement, the original provision for 25% of Agniveers to enter the regular cadre after their initial four-year engagement and serve a further 15 years remains unchanged. But the remaining 75%, who were earlier due to be demobilised on completing their initial tour of duty, will now be offered a two-year extension, deemed in all likelihood as Agniveer-Extended (Agniveer-E), after which they will be given another opportunity to compete for regular enrolment, subject to objective selection criteria. But even this assertion remains an enigma wrapped in a mystery, as Gen Subramani said all the latter Agniveers too would be inducted on a permanent basis.Creating unequal soldiersThis revised arrangement creates two distinct categories within the same intake, but with unequal terms of service and career prospects: the 25% selected for the regular cadre who will automatically enter extended service after four years and the remaining 75% who will need to serve two years longer before becoming eligible for regular enrolment. By then, however, the first group will already have a two-year seniority advantage in a tightly structured and hierarchical military, where seniority governs career progression and promotion and, of course, remuneration.Gen Subramani also left a fundamental question unanswered: Will future Agniveer recruitment continue under the same four-year initial engagement and six-year extended-service arrangement, or will the terms change yet again? In his recent presser, he recast the scheme without making clear whether this is now the settled recruitment model or merely another interim arrangement, subject to further modification.Moreover, those Agniveers absorbed earlier into regular service will have a longer period of pensionable service and, upon retirement, are likely to draw higher pensions, while their batchmates, entering the regular cadre two years later, would, in all likelihood, find their retirement benefits correspondingly reduced. Military analyst Lieutenant General H S Panag (retd), former General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Northern and Central Commands, has described the changed two-tier Agnipath arrangement as one spawning “unequal soldiers” and termed the entire scheme “ethically, morally and institutionally wrong”.The outspoken three-star officer also questioned the military logic of having three categories of personnel serving within the same armed forces: regular soldiers, sailors and airmen recruited before Agnipath was introduced in 2022, Agniveers subsequently selected for regular enrolment; and those continuing on two-year extensions. All perform near-identical duties, face the same dangers, yet receive markedly different pay and service benefits, including death and disability compensation.To illustrate the disparity, he said a regular soldier with six years’ service receives Rs 56,724 a month, against Rs 47,500 for an Agniveer in his fifth year. Gen Panag’s objection is to the institutional creation of ‘unequal’ soldiers within the same military establishment, occupying the same trenches and facing the same privations, but treated differently when it comes to their pay and entitlements.How did the military leadership allow this to happen?Gen Panag’s indictment raises a larger and more disturbing question too: How did the military leadership allow the armed forces to be landed in this mess in the first place? Responsibility for implementing such a chaotic and ill-conceived scheme cannot be laid at the government’s door alone.The military leadership, then headed by India’s first CDS, Gen Bipin Rawat, was equally answerable for failing to challenge a scheme whose implications for the armed forces’ manpower structure, training, regimental and unit cohesion and soldiers’ careers, were glaringly obvious. Instead of questioning its assumptions and warning against their consequences, the senior service brass enthusiastically lent its professional authority to the government’s political agenda, defended Agnipath and helped sell it as a major military reform guaranteed to deliver a younger force and effect pension savings. In short, the military did not merely acquiesce, but became an active advocate of a plan whose palpable shortcomings should have been obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of soldiering, as the public defence of Agnipath by senior officers over the past four years, has made clear.In mid-2022, for instance, Lt Gen Anil Puri, then additional secretary in the newly created Department of Military Affairs (DMA) and the senior military officer tasked with explaining and defending Agnipath, described it as a “highly progressive step” and a “God-sent opportunity” to lower the age profile of the armed forces, making it considerably younger and more technologically oriented.And, as rioting against Agnipath’s inadequacies erupted across several states – like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Punjab in early 2022, with trains and railway stations set ablaze, public property vandalised and clashes with police – Puri continued to defend the scheme.In televised interviews, he claimed Agnipath had been worked out over two years, through 254 meetings lasting a total of 750 hours and involving officials from the Ministry of Defence, the three services and other government departments. Be that as it may, this exhaustive exercise, in hindsight, failed miserably to anticipate even the obvious difficulties and shortcomings that have now compelled the government to substantially recast the scheme, exposing how little the elaborate planning had actually achieved.Consequences on ‘naam, namak and nishan’“The fundamental question is why the military leadership lent its authority so readily to a scheme whose consequences for the armed forces manpower structure, cohesion and the time-honoured ethos of naam, namak and nishan (regimental honour, loyalty to the service and pride in its colours) should have been apparent from the outset,” said a two-star Indian Army veteran. The military, he remonstrated, cannot tamper with the very foundations of soldiering at the politicians’ whim, claim over four years later to have been taken by surprise and then whimsically reverse course when the adverse consequences had become impossible to ignore, he declared, declining to be named.A two-star Indian Navy veteran concurred, stating that the DMA had ‘meekly endorsed’ the government’s rationale for Agnipath as an exercise in administrative modernisation, borrowing heavily from foreign military models without adequately considering India’s very different requirements. But these comparisons were fundamentally flawed and misleading, he added, declining to be identified.Countries like the US, Britain, France and Australia, for example, employed short-service contracts under very different conditions and manpower requirements. While most of these nations had moved away from the draft to build all-volunteer armies, a few had fielded smaller militaries, shaped by very different security concerns and day-to-day missions.India, for its part, relied on an all-volunteer force. It maintained a massive standing military – particularly its army – to counter enduring threats from Pakistan to the west and China to the north. Furthermore, its army’s regimental system, with roots stretching back to the 18th and 19th centuries, had evolved around long service, shared experience and loyalty to the rasala and unit, which was unlike anything in Western militaries.Many veterans argued that copying foreign recruitment strategies, without accounting for these key differences, was a grievous mistake. The objection, they said, was never to having a younger Army, but to sending trained soldiers home after just four years, at a time when they were beginning to acquire the operational experience and confidence that rendered them effective on the battlefield.Elections around the cornerSince the Agnipath rollback comes just ahead of assembly elections in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh in early 2027 – three states that had witnessed considerable unrest over the PBOR recruitment scheme in 2022 and traditionally supplied a substantial proportion of the armed forces’ manpower – the timing inevitably invites questions over whether electoral considerations have played a part in the BJP-led government’s decision to substantially recast the scheme.The operational implications of the Agnipath initiative were not merely theoretical. “No wise commanding officer will use these Agniveers for real soldiering when it is a matter of life and death,” former Brigadier Advitya Madan had categorically declared in 2022. No active army could sustain a 75% turnover of personnel and still maintain high professional standards, the former Punjab Regiment officer, who had also served with the United Nations, said in an analysis in the Hindustan Times at the time.He even went a step further, relating an irreverent joke involving Agniveers which he claimed was doing the rounds in Army circles at the time. It concerned a company commander, a major, who, after receiving intelligence about militants hiding in a village, asked one of his senior junior commissioned officers (JCOs) to assemble a quick reaction team (QRT) to tackle the insurgents.Weary of receiving such daily intelligence inputs, the grizzled JCO reportedly asked: “Saheb, is this hard intelligence or just another run-of-the-mill input? If it is hard intelligence, I will get a team of regular soldiers ready. Otherwise, I can give you a pack of Agniveers.”The brigadier’s witticism may now lose some of its sting under the revised Agnipath scheme, but that still does not absolve the service leadership of its responsibility for the original muddle. Having backed the scheme so enthusiastically, defended it against its critics and brushed aside concerns that were hardly difficult to foresee, its volte-face raises rather troubling questions about the military’s overall professional independence and operational judgement.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.