Journal of Management (JOM) Volume 5, Issue 5, September-October 2018, pp. 15–22, Article ID: JOM_05_05_003 Available online at http://www.iaeme.com/JOM/issues.asp?JType=JOM&VType=5&IType=5 ISSN Print: 2347-3940 and ISSN Online: 2347-3959

A SOLDIER’S CONCEPT OF RELIGION

Ashwani Kumar Research Scholar, Guru Kashi University, Bathinda, Punjab

B. S. Dhaliwal Former Vice Chancellor, Guru Kashi University, Talwandi Sabo, Bathinda, Punjab

ABSTRACT The accommodation of religion in a soldier’s way of life poses two challenges for an Army, firstly subordinating religious authority to military authority and secondly maintaining unit cohesion. Religion is a source of motivation for the solider in an Army. Battle cries are frequently religious in nature. Religious teachers give inspiring sermons and reassuring advice to soldiers ahead of operations. In India, religious conflict is an integral part of the present environment in which the soldier executes his tasks. When joining the Army, the soldier takes an oath on the Constitution of India and their respective religious texts to uphold the honour code of the Army. In addition, the Army celebrates all religious festivals and leaders, regardless of their faith and ethnicity participate in all festivals' with the led' with equal fervor. This article makes an endeavor to understand a soldier’s concept of religion and how the Indian Army has made a concerted effort to accommodate various religious tenets in a nation with multiple faiths, while simultaneously remaining apolitical and maintaining cohesion as an effective pillar of a National Security and State craft. Key words: Defence Forces, Civil Administration, Coordination, Natural Disasters. Cite this Article: Ashwani Kumar and B. S. Dhaliwal, A Soldier’s Concept of Religion, Journal of Management, 5(5), 2018, pp. 15–22. http://www.iaeme.com/JOM/issues.asp?JType=JOM&VType=5&IType=5

1. INTRODUCTION Over the centuries India has not accepted any religion as a state religion, thereby implying that India maintains absolute impartiality and neutrality towards all religions. The provisions relating to “Right of Freedom of Religion” of the Articles 25 & 28 of the Constitution of India make India a secular state. To further strengthen this assurance, the 42nd amendment of the constitution inserts the term “secular” in the preamble of the constitution. Article 25 of Indian Constitution grants freedom to every citizen of India to profess, practice and propagate his own religion. In addition, the preamble of the constitution professes to secure to its entire citizen’s liberty of belief, faith and worship. The Indian Army is possibly one of the corner stones of this Constitutional preamble and it is by virtue of this that the Indian soldier remains insulated from both politics and religion. In addition, the entire recruitment policy has remained on the basis of merit only and not on reservation as is mandated in other Government organizations / departments. This is partly the reason that the Indian Army commands the strong reputation it does today.

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 15 [email protected] A Soldier’s Concept of Religion

2. RELIGION AND WAR The instrumental use of religion can be traced to the British colonial army and before. After the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, the British colonial army executed and imprisoned hundreds of religious teachers. And yet, in the following decades, the colonial military had once again begun to tolerate independent pundits, maulvis and fakirs in its cantonments. According to Nile Green, “the relationship between the religious traditions of the soldier and the exigencies of the British Empire was one of give and take”. He writes, “The religion of the Indian soldier was capable of assisting or resisting imperial agendas, lending mechanisms of loyalty no less than rebellion”. The British consciously tolerated these teachers in spite of their danger, as they were the brokers who promised protection, promotion, comfort and miracles to their soldiers. Overall the British realized the significance of these religious men in the lives of the sepoys and therein, their importance of being accommodated. Some examples are:  The Hindu Gurkhas are known to use the battle cry “Jai Ma Kali” (Victory to the Goddess Kali).  The victory cry “Jo Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal” (Blessed is the one who proclaims the truth of God) can be heard among the Sikh Light Infantry and the Sikh Regiment.  Muslim soldiers in the Jammu and Kashmir Rifles, Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry and the Grenadiers have used the battle cry “Allah hu Akbar” (God is great). In countries with officially recognized state religions, militaries may remain autonomous (as in Pakistan and Bangladesh) or subordinate their authority to religious officials to varying degrees (as in Iran and the Holy See). In either of these instances, the army’s capacity to act can be heightened by religion. On the contrary, honor or izzat, is a powerful norm in Indian Army. Religion has been one of the most motivating factors to a soldier both for his spiritual and psychological preparations. ‘Dharma-yudhas’, ‘Crusades’, ‘Jihads’ have been fought in the name of religion to either uphold an ideology, expand it or to contain the expansion that was perceived to threaten a particular credo. The cause the Allies of World War II found and propagated successfully against Hitler and Mussolini, was the absence of righteousness from the Fascist and Nazi ideology that militated against the basic tenets of the Christianity. The Russians also saw it as a threat to Leninism and Marxism. The Germans were equally convinced that Communism led by the Bolsheviks needed to be eliminated in the interest of Christianity and the fight against the Europeans and the Jews sought to undo the injustice caused to them by the Treaty of Versailles. The latter manifested in its fury to inundate entire Europe. Against the Japanese, the Allies found a cause to crush the cruel “graphitization” by Imperialistic Japan that threatened peace and tranquility in Asia-Pacific regions. Religious and the moral dimensions were primary stratagems used by the Americans in their fight against the Russians during the Cold War. They branded the former as the “Evil Empire” and “Godless Empire”. Similar names are now being surreptitiously attributed to the remnants of Communism in Cuba, North Korea and China. As the world moves into the twenty-first-century, some crystal gazers have begun to see nature of future conflict due not only to traditional territorial disputes, economic domination or the historic ethnic grievances but a fashionable concept of “clash of civilization”. It presupposes a conflict between the Christians and the Muslims each attempting to dominate the other. Whether it does happen or not, the basic cause nonetheless would have been found, perhaps at the goading of the fundamentalist elements of the two major religions of the world. The above hypothesis, in fact, generates, from the cyclic recurrence of wars, all human efforts at maintaining peace, notwithstanding. In several ways it seems to support the idea of

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 16 [email protected] Ashwani Kumar and B. S. Dhaliwal

JFC Fuller who wrote in the Decisive battles of the American Civil War. “War should be looked upon as a whole, just as life is a whole and therefore, its activities must be related to the cycles of peacefulness out of which war arises and into which they sink. In short there is rhythm between peace and war and next war and unless it is measured there can be no true understanding of either peace or war…” Religion is a source of motivation for soldiers of the Indian Army. Although there is no denying the fact that it can lead to conflict in such a diverse army as ours. The Army is maintaining its religiously diverse forces by maintaining a strong cohesion in religiously diverse armed forces. This cohesion is maintained by recruiting from a diverse religious society as it exists today and also conducting operations in an environment across all states which have people from all faiths. The solider has to operate sometimes in the same conflict ridden religious society from where he has been recruited. The challenges that religion might pose for the solider exist but the army relies on carefully nurtured institutional mechanisms for the solider to cope with these challenges. It is ironic that an Indian soldier defends a state that is constitutionally secular, while remaining a strong force of believers. This paradox poses distinct challenges for the institution. The Army respects the each and every religious faith, religious practice and culture of every solider, (which are precious to him) while continually establishing the primacy of the ‘olive green’ uniform in a soldiers mind. This uniform which he dons while in service directly depicts institutional authority over religious authority. In India, religious conflict is an integral part of the present environment in which the soldier exists. The Army is regularly called upon in aid to civil authority, to enforce the writ of the state in periods of domestic insurgencies and internal strife when the state machinery is unable to contain the situation. In this situation, the open connect of religiosity with its practices exposes the soldiers to the danger of faith-driven mutiny’s and interfaith conflict within its own ranks. These faith instigated or related challenges have a bearing on the military’s organization and operations and have to be nipped in the bud before they spread across some fault lines. The reaction of certain Sikh units in the aftermath of the Golden Temple crises bears adequate testimony of such a situation.

3. RAISON D’ETRE OF ARMED FORCES The cause a country gives to its army becomes its mission, a mission that calls for any sacrifice. The soldier is bound by innumerable conditions and circumstances. That makes his job more difficult. Imagine, for example, his problems when the Indian troops got inducted into Kashmir (1947-48) where uncertainty of the mission created several difficulties in operations, logistics and were further exacerbated by religion. From the beginning itself Islam was attempted to be exploited by Pakistan. Was the Army then to create a religious cause to effectively counter Pakistan propaganda? The appeal, per force, had to be the call of the duty, a manifestation of the ‘dharma’ as ordained by the individual soldier’s faith. A soldier’s ‘dharma’ warranted him to defend those, for whose protection he had been tasked. This spiritual-moral component of his duty provided him the much needed fearlessness and bravery in the face of extreme dangers to his life and honor of the unit which made the Army’s raison d’etre. Heroism and martyrs sprung from it. Similar has been the IPKF’s dilemma.

4. SCRIPTURES: A SOURCE OF MOTIVATION Several of our religious cum philosophical books serve as a reservoir of motivation to the soldier. Take the Gita first. It is at its best when Lord Krishna, the God incarnate and a guide – friend of Arjun – the representative of the community of the soldiers – asks him to fight his

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 17 [email protected] A Soldier’s Concept of Religion own kith and kin as a matter of divine duty. Seeing Arjun’s despondency, he tells him not to grieve for those who may be slain, for, they all were perishable. He moves to the empirical plane and says it’s only the body that dies and not the soul. Should he fail, he warns him, he would incur sin, the sin of ignominy and shame. We see in modern time’s shame and blasphemy of the Battle of Waterloo experienced by Napoleon. Said Napoleon in exile in St Helena: “Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily”. The surrender by General AK Niazi of the Pakistan Army in 1971 must be haunting him in his grave. So would possibly be the case of General Leopoldo Galteri after the Argentine defeat at the Falklands. Fear, death and misery of injuries or becoming a prisoner and be tortured, haunt every soldier fighting a war. The Gita offers a psychological dimension to it by assuring a soldier who is killed in the battlefield, wherein scripture states that the supreme sacrifice would enable the soul reach heaven – a privilege which only the supreme like the ‘Yogi’s of yore’ alone enjoy. But the earth is promised to him in the event of victory: the concept of veerbhogya-vasundhara (the earth belongs to the brave). The Gita also says that the result of a battle or war could never be predicted. Hence a soldier is advised to play it as a game worrying the least about the results. While its larger implication can well be related to every circumstance and adversity of life’s struggle, in war its application is pointed and poignant. The best of the battlefield leaders, Erwin Rommel, Mansfield, Patton and our own General Thimayya believed in “playing the game”, in the same spirit of say playing a boxing match, where the tactics and play mattered more than the referee’s final whistle in the ring. Read the ‘Rommel Diaries’ or ‘Lost Opportunities’ or General Thimayya’s accounts and the readers will agree with what the holy book says. It’s the philosophy of ‘selfless action’ that the Gita expounds. The Gita places soldier’s place and status something between the ‘founding father’ and the ‘custodian of the civilization and the defender of a nation.’ Fight to preserve society, culture, its present and the future or else the whole nation will be enslaved, resulting in the chastisement of the men folk and the exploitation of women, the degeneration of society and the ‘varnashankar’ bringing in a genocide. Not to fight, it says, is un-Aryan, unmanly. So also say other religions and religion related literature. These thoughts are best depicted by two writers: - Eric Linklater saw soldier’s indispensability when he said: “Nothing has been made safe The fields where the building shall be made And the soldier is the scaffolding until it has been built The soldier gets no reward but the honour.” - The same is echoed in TB Macaulay’s often repeated lines: “To every man on this earth, Death comes sooner or later; How can a man die better? Than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his father. And the temples of his Gods.” Today, the Indian Army has a volunteer force of more than 1.15 million active personnel recruited from this culturally diverse environment. Most armies in secular states provide for the spiritual needs of their soldiers. The Indian Army, however, goes to great lengths to accommodate religion and uses it instrumentally to motivate its solider. When joining the army, a soldier takes an oath on the Constitution of India and their respective religious text to

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 18 [email protected] Ashwani Kumar and B. S. Dhaliwal uphold the honour code of the army. The army celebrates all religious festivals and officers, regardless of their faith and ethnicity, participate in all festivals with their soldiers. The army maintains places of worship as Sarv Dharm Sthal on its bases and provides a religious teacher who is supposed to know all the religions and its customs. This teacher remains with the unit during regular operations and even accompanies the unit to forward areas during training and battle.

5. DUTY IS RELIGION It is from the physical to the psychic; material to the psychological; empirical to the spiritual as the tone and texture of every religion begins to draw a familiar simile: Your “dharma is karma”. A soldier is what epitomizes ‘Duty’ as an honorable duty, of all. When in doubt, says the Quran, ‘fight’. The Bible also sermonizes: “Be soldiers of God; heroes of faith.” Winston Churchill immortalized it when he told the soldiers of the Allies: “Ye be brave soldiers”. The tenets of Jihad in Quran draw inspiration from the concept of waging a holy war against the unrighteous. The Quran arouses the warriors by imploring, “Let those on the path of righteousness fight, God looks after those who barter their present lives for that which is to come; for whoever fights on God’s path whether be slain or conquer. We will in the end, give a great reward”. It also says” Be discerning…turn not your back… fight for the cause of God against those, who fight against you…” The Gita says “Slain you will gain heaven; conquering enjoys the earth, and there, Grid your loins and go unto battle with firm resolve.” The Tenth ‘Guru’, who provided greater martial qualities to the Sikhs developed a psycho religious appeal as he prayed before Lord Shiva: “Pray Lord, give me courage and bravery so that I never shirk from noble acts; never fear to determinedly fight and win the battle; into the battle, I go with Your name on my lips, and if death came I die praising your glory.” When Aurangzeb’s tyranny increased oppressively against him he exhorted all righteous people and his followers: “Chun Kara z hama hilte dar guzashat halal asthudne beh shamsheer dast ie when all lawful and peaceful means of negotiations exhaust it is lawful to draw the sword.” The Buddha preached Nirvana through self-renunciation and peaceful conduct of life. But it will be sheer ignorance to assume that he forsook self defence in preference to a meek surrender, as often is made out. He nonetheless preached meditation as the panacea to all ailments of life and in its successive interpretations and application developed willy-nilly a dichotomy over its supremacy over work. It led to a degree of passivity among the people of this otherwise wonderful faith. History then bears adequate proof of the Tibetan people being overwhelmed by their more aggressive neighbours, China, Nepal and British India, for no better reason but neglect of its soldierly and security. Religion had been a powerful instrument of nation-states and their policies. Their role saw the predominance not only of the clergy but the clergy’s role in all kinds of ‘Dharma Yudhas’. The moral, spiritual and psychological components often came from them. They became ipso-facto, the mandate for action. Religion is a source of motivation for the solider in the Army. Regiments predominantly made up of Hindus frequently adopt deities that reflect their regional character. Religious teachers use folktales and stories from holy texts such as the Mahabharata and Guru Granth Sahib to inculcate their troops with the concepts of pride and valor. Battle cries are frequently religious in nature. Pictures of fallen soldiers are kept in places of worship. Religious teachers offer prayers before any task that has to be undertaken whether it is move of vehicles to moving for exercises or launching of operations in insurgency areas. Religious teachers give

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 19 [email protected] A Soldier’s Concept of Religion inspiring sermons and reassuring advice to soldiers ahead of operations. The challenge for a professional army, therefore, is to acknowledge that religion is inherent part of the army and to harness the positives of religion, but in no way underlining the fact that the izzat of the country and the uniform is first and foremost.

6. ‘DHARMA’: THE MORAL PROPELLANT Soldering is akin to the historic battlefield of the Kurukshetra which demands that all soldier’s must develop both the skill as well as the moral values. Steadfastness, fidelity and allegiance are the soldier’s pillar/stones and forte. But not without God’s blessings “At all times remember me and fight” says the Gita. “All your doubts and fears shall disappear.” Faith stiffens a soldier’s resolve to carry the fight on to its conclusion. “Abide with me”, remains the best Biblical hymn which shows God as he employed faith as tool of survival. If the Jews went kissing the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem after each war since 1949, they saw religion as the major propellant for their high morale. Anwar Sadat used it effectively in the Ramadan (or the Yom Kippur) war of 1973, Pakistan’s proxy war in J&K and its so called Taliban offensive into Afghanistan is wholly based on religious fervor and frenzy. Religion, when combined with other such causes turns a war frightfully malicious and murky and it is what seems to be the future trend. The accommodation of religion in a soldier’s way of life poses two challenges for the army, firstly subordinating religious authority to military authority and secondly maintaining unit cohesion. Both religion and the military impose a set of regular practices, behavioral constraints and a moral code on their members. These are supposed to order individuals’ lives. When the military can accommodate the essential attributes of a religion, the two coexist, and religion can even reinforce the military’s goals and objectives. It is when religious attributes come into conflict with the military that insubordination, interfaith conflict among the ranks, and even mutinies can arise. Distinct hierarchies with different centers of authority define the Indian Army and the multiple faiths of its soldiers. Historically, one major organizational challenge for the army has been to establish the supremacy of the nation- state over religion. The Indian Army makes a concerted effort to accommodate religious tenets, but that effort is fundamentally limited. In instances when the two hierarchies are in conflict, the military’s authority overrides religious authority. “Since faith can often be an important part of a soldier’s life, he must know that it is respected in the army. At the same time, his training must instill in him the belief that his duty and loyalty to the army, his fellow men, and his country are greater than his obligations to his faith. Officers and soldiers alike adopt the distinct codes and practices of a regiment in which they are commissioned and enrolled. The regimental history, traditions, mottos, insignias and awards instill in a solider the regimental identity in which he is commissioned or enrolled. Long tenures of duty with the same battalion of the regiment sometime extending to 32 years (average age at which a solider gets commissioned is as young as 16) imprint this identity over time. The adoption of the regimental identity helps establish the army’s authority over the other allegiances of the soldiers. By grounding the idea of honor in regimental identity, the army undercuts the hold of faith on soldiers. The army’s operations, especially when forces are conducting counterinsurgency duties or restoring order in the aftermath of communal violence, also require it to remain sensitive to religious concerns. Internal cohesion and managing diversity while retaining an effective fighting force has been a long-standing challenge for Indian army. It is important to point out that in our country, identity politics – religious and ethnic, remains one of the key motifs of democratic politics. The army exists within an environment where religious and ethnic conflict is commonplace, and the state regularly turns to the army to enforce law and order during

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 20 [email protected] Ashwani Kumar and B. S. Dhaliwal communal riots and to conduct counterinsurgency operations. The army therefore needs effective mechanisms to remain apolitical and maintain cohesion. According to conventional wisdom, an organization such as an Army should be driven by the objective of projecting maximum military power during battle. An Army is not perpetually engaged in fighting wars with other states, however, they are often called on to perform duties related to internal security or to assist state administration. Officers and soldiers alike have to live and train while still being a part of society. In multiethnic and multi religious societies, soldiers are exposed to the social conflicts that surround them. The Army cannot build barriers to shield themselves from these pressures, but an active role in the preservation of internal security can make them vulnerable to social conflicts. Therefore, they must strive to ensure self-preservation. As organizations, an Army also has an institutional memory which is well documented experiences over a period of time. The modern Indian Army inherited from its colonial predecessor the fear of internal conflict and a concern for its own preservation, while existing in a society prone to religious and ethnic volatility. Because religion could not be separated from the soldiers recruited into the force, it was accommodated and where possible, harnessed to provide motivation, comfort and victory.

REFERENCES [1] Donald. L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and A Democratic South Africa?: Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); [2] Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977) and Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). [3] Ashutosh Varshney and Amit Ahuja, “Antecedent Nationhood, Subsequent Statehood: Explaining the Relative Success of Indian Federalism,” in Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil War, ed. Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). [4] Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle (Calcutta: Rupa and Company, 1985). [5] K. S. Brar, Operation Blue Star: The True Story (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1993). [6] R. Peters, Jihad in Medieval and Modern Islam, Leiden, and his article “Jihåd”, in Th e Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, Vol. 2, 1995, pp. 369-373. [7] Ilan Kelman, J. F, Disaster diplomacy in Jammu and Kashmir. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction , 2018, pp 1-9. [8] Patil, P, Disaster Management in India Vol 2 Issue 1. Indian Research Journal of Extension Education , 2012, pp 1-4. [9] Paul, D. B, Disaster Management: A Case Study of Uttarakhand. Bangalore: Research gate.2013, pp. 32 - 47 [10] Talukdhar, G, Disaster Management System In Nepal – Policy Issues And Solutions. Journal of Risk Analysis and Crisis Response, Vol. 2, No. 3 , 2012, pp 166-172

BIOGRAPHY Lt Gen Ashwani Kumar is an alumnus of the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun. He has done his M. Sc. in Defence and Strategic Studies from University of Madras and MPhil in Defence & Management Studies from School of Defence and Management Studies, Devi

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 21 [email protected] A Soldier’s Concept of Religion

Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore. He has held varied command, staff and instructional appointments in the Army in all types of terrain & conflict scenarios. He is currently posted as the Adjutant General at Integrated Headquarters’ of the Ministry of Defence (Army). He has also been actively exploring the possibilities of incorporating Spiritual Management in the curriculum of the Army to reduce non operational casualties in the Army at the directional and functional levels in several training institutions. For his distinguished and exceptional service in the Army, he has been awarded Ati Vishisht Seva Medal and Vishisht Seva Medal. The General Officer is presently pursuing Ph D in Management. Col. Dr. BS Dhaliwal: Received the M.Tech and Ph.D. degrees from department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. His specialization is operation Research applications to management. He served as a Technical officer in Indian Army for 26 years including teaching and R&D assignments there. During his academic carrier of thirty years he has held the post of Professor, Dean of two engineering colleges and Dean Academics of a University: At was the Vice Chancellor of Guru Kashi University at Talwandi Sabo, District Bathinda, Punjab India.

http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/index.asp 22 [email protected]