Army corrects a self-goal

Ever since the Modi Government came to power with the substantial help of the ex-servicemen community, the question of pay, allowances and izzat for those serving in uniform and out of it has occupied centre stage. For a party that repeatedly invokes the fauji and has politically appropriated the surgical strikes for repeated unfurling in state elections (Himachal Pradesh is the latest example), the BJP has been stumped by its inability to match its election rhetoric with delivery on the ground.  Against the contextual background of the One Rank One Pension (OROP) conundrum and the inability of the government to resolve the rank parity issue, it is welcome that the Army has worked around a problem hanging fire for six years. 

For years the armed forces have lived with the notion that the civilian bureaucracy has nudged or massaged rules in its favour. Their hopes had arisen after the advent of the BJP government wrapped itself in olive green. If the restoring of gazetted officers status for JCOs is meant to divert the issue of rank parity with civilian bureaucrats, discontent will continue to remain high. Successive Defence Ministers have handed out assurances, just as it was with OROP. But a year after a committee set out to resolve the rank parity issue, a narrative has been rolled out to the effect that the Government will not permit any false rank parity. This was after heated exchanges in the correspondence exchanged between the Army and the civilian bureaucracy.

In order to prevent the rank parity issue from becoming another issue of dissatisfaction like the OROP, the expectation among the armed forces is that the government needs to bite the bullet. If the downgrading of JCOs was an Army self-goal, the armed forces hold the civilians culpable for disturbing the equivalence and downgrading the status of service officers in the armed force headquarters. The anomaly was a hand-me-down from the UPA government that had been unable to resolve the issue for six years. This is a pointer to the tortuous nature of the task at hand.