ABSTRACT
The existence of this system in India’s regional context is all the more remarkable for its durability. The national security apparatus was devised by Lords Ismay and Mountbatten in 1947, at the request of India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In the violent context of Partition, their priority was to ensure survival of the civilian polity at the apex of defence decision-making. This logic still animates and explains the defence system today, which is still that of Ismay and Mountbatten, with a few minor embellishments on its periphery. The central principles of the system are its establishment of checks and balances within the military, with no overall coordinating military figure along the lines of the Chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, by contrast, a unified civilian bureaucracy reporting to the prime minister, who also enjoys ultimate control over the military. This absence of checks and balances within the civilian realm, compared with its status as the organising principle of the military apparatus, ensures a dominance of the civilian over the military to the extent that that it has led analysts to characterise Indian civil-military relations as an ‘absent dialogue’ (Mukherjee 2009).
