Agnipath Scheme: An “Agnipareeksha” For The Indian Youth
Vasudev Chakravarti, Anjana H Kumar
On 16th June, India’s Defence Minister announced the Agnipath Scheme, the new recruitment scheme for the Indian Armed Forces. It envisions recruiting “agniveers”, youth aged between 17.5 and 21, into the Armed Forces for four years, instead of the existing seventeen years, of which six months would comprise training, at the end of which only 25 per cent would be retained. The remaining 75 per cent would be released from service with a one-time lump sum payment and would have no pension or gratuity. The agniveers will only be eligible for a 30 day leave per year instead of the prior 90 days per year.
However, the discontent of Indian youth with the new scheme has been made clear in the intervening period. Protests have erupted across the country, especially in the Hindi belt states, such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana, where recruitment to the army is one of the most coveted employment opportunities. Student and youth organisations, including the SFI and DYFI, have taken to the streets facing brutal police repression. The reason such protests are occurring is because the scheme is a pathway for contractualisation.
The ‘One Rank One Pension’ Scheme of the Modi-government, instituted in 2015 for more than 25 lakh defence personnel, increased the immediate and subsequent financial responsibilities of the central government. In the current financial year, Rs 1,19,696 crore is budgeted for pensions, along with another 163453 crores for salaries, which amounts to 54 per cent of the budget of the Defence Ministry. This is seen as a wasteful expenditure to the votaries of neoliberal economic policy. Even the government spending money on veterans who have served the country is anathema to them. Withdrawing on the vacant promises made for election, the Agnipath Scheme is the product of a long ongoing discourse on how to reduce the pension expenditure in the defence budget in order to utilise the same for “defence force modernisation”. The scheme is very agreeable to the government and neoliberal policy advocates as it will overtime turn a significant portion of the servicemen in the Armed Forces into contract labour who can be forgotten and would not have to be spent upon once their period of four years is done. However, for the Indian youth who apply to the army, the guarantee of long term regular employment and post-retirement benefits such as pension and gratuity are of crucial importance. In an economy with massive unemployment and scant opportunities, the army has always been a beacon of hope. It is this hope which has been taken away from them in a single swoop.
This contractualisation not only impacts the agniveers in their personal capacity but also can negatively impact the professionalism, spirit and military ethos within the Armed Forces. In Particular, the clause of 25 percent of the soldiers recruited getting absorbed into the army sets off a cut- throat competition within the force, which otherwise needs to be built on camaraderie. Further, the soldiers who are on a contract and have no certainty over their future will have to carry the massive burden of having to prepare and plan for a second career post their period of service. It needs to be noted that the age group in question, 17 years – 21 years, is a period right after schooling, where the person chooses or streamlines his career towards achieving employment. While their peers will be fighting out the brutal job market under capitalism, acquiring skills, the agniveers would be left behind with no education to achieve any social mobility while simultaneously being equipped with training in the army that they cannot fulfil post the 4 years. Data presented in the Lok Sabha on 6th March, 2013 by then Defence Minister A. K. Antony explained that a total of 368 defence personnel committed suicide from 2010 to 2012, out of which 310 soldiers belong to the Indian army alone; in 2010, 115 cases were reported as compared to 102 in 2011 and 93 in 2012. While the material and psychological perils of army personnel are of common knowledge, the addition of this insecurity of being pushed to the vast pool of unemployed of the country, post dedicated and gruelling training and employment in the army, is a danger awaiting the youth of the country.
At the same time the government on 10th December 2021 had informed the parliament in response to a question by CPI(M) MP V. Sivadasan that the shortage in the Indian Army stands at 104053 personnel, while there are 12431 vacancies in the Indian Navy and 5471 in the Indian Air Force due to there being no recruitment in the past two years. The number for recruitment through Agnipath this year is said to be 45,000. Further, the Armed Forces have clarified repeatedly that henceforth recruitment shall be done only through Agnipath. Hence, not only is there contractualisation but it also appears that the Armed Forces are going in for downsizing at a time when there have already been complaints of shortage of manpower. This will further impact the professionalism within the Armed Forces. Substituting modernisation with technology instead of the expansive labour force is a lesson we have learnt since the inception of the nation. The scheme also bypasses the 1966 state-wise quota for recruitment into the army subject to the recruitable male population of the state. This might lead to a linguistic or ethnic imbalance in the Indian army, presenting a severe threat to democracy, including situations of civil war, especially factoring in the test on federalism presented by the ruling party’s ideology.
The government has responded to some of the criticisms of the Agnipath Scheme, with different ministries and departments scrambling to provide support to it. The home minister announced priority to agniveers in recruitment to the Central Armed Police Forces and Assam Rifles. The Department of Telecom held a meeting with Telecom Service Providers on how they would be able to employ the agniveers and what sort of training would be required for them to be employable. Similarly, the Department of Financial Services held a meeting with Chief Executives of Public Sector Banks, Public Sector Insurance Companies and Financial Institutions along the same lines. This scramble by the BJP has been taken to such a farcical extent that BJP national General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya has gone so far to announce that agniveers would be given priority in being hired as security for the BJP office.
In reality, this claim of providing employment in various government ministries and departments and public sector enterprises is only a window dressing of an answer to the question of employment. If these jobs were already there, then the youth would already be attaining them. Even the creation of such jobs should not be dependent on a scheme such as this. Further, if preference to agniveers is given in all these different sectors, it will only leave other youth unemployed and raise questions on giving such preferences in the first place. It would make the Agnipath Scheme, not for military recruitment but also an absurd single window scheme for recruitment to all forms of government and public sector employment. More surprisingly, several multinational corporations involved in IT, security and engineering have come forward and announced preferential hiring of “skilled and disciplined” agniveer. This goes on to reveal the nexus of the central government with crony capitalists, who have had a smooth ride to accumulating the country’s wealth under BJP’s rule while simultaneously attempting to create a divide within the working-class youth of the country. This was exposed astutely by the former Admiral Arun Prakash, who served as Chief of the Naval Staff from 31st July 2004 to 31st October 2006, in reply to a tweet by the chairman of Mahindra Group Anand Mahindra who welcomed the “opportunity to recruit such trained, capable young people.” Adm Arun Prakash responded with a simple query, “Why await this new scheme? Has the Mahendra Group, so far, reached out to thousands of highly skilled & disciplined ex-Servicemen (Jawans & Officers), retiring every year & desperately seeking a 2nd career. It would be nice to get some statistics from your Group.” The admiral’s query neatly exposes the falsity of the claims of the Modi govt and its crony capitalist backers that the private sector would absorb the released agniveers. The market forces would already have conspired to employ the thousands of jawans who retire every year and who have up to 17 years’ experience in the army and are far more experienced than the agniveer youth who would have had six months of training and four years of service. Above that their keen focus on “disciplined” agniveer workforce doesn’t hide their expectation of a silent and accommodating worker, who wouldn’t unionise and raise questions due to their precarity of being replaced by the vast pool of reserve army of labour. The unrest across the country has already proved that their speculation has failed.
What the Agnipath Scheme tells us, in reality, is that the BJP government can go to any end in its agenda of implementing neoliberal policy — even to contractualise the Armed Forces and hamper national security by affecting the professionalism of the Armed Forces. However, in this attempt they have provoked the youth, who are the children of the workers and peasants of this country. They are the children who fought together with their parents for a year to ensure the rollback of the three disastrous farm laws. These agniveers know that if they enter the agnipath, what awaits them after their four years of service is the agnipareeksha of finding employment in the Indian economy. With this knowledge and conviction, the youth of the country have come forth in the struggle against the Agnipath Scheme, with the realisation that wars are not just fought at borders but also on the streets against anti-nationals who sell their country to capital.
Vasudev Chakravarti holds a Master’s in Development and Labour Studies from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Anjana H Kumar is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
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