The issue of rank parity and false equivalence has been festering for long in India’s Ministry of Defence, and civil-Military divide has erupted once again over ‘false rank equivalence’. India’s defence armed forces reiterated that they will not pay heed to fresh instructions issued by the defence ministry’s chief administrative officer (CAO) to accord higher rank status to the Armed Forces Headquarters Civil Service (AFHQ-CS) officials. As per the administrative order issued by the CAO’s office on October 30, 2018 to the chiefs of the Army, Navy, IAF and integrated defence staff as well as heads of inter-service organizations, a director of AFHQ-CS must be equated with a one-star general or Brigadier and principal director with a two-star Major General. Armed Services took the position that the order should have been addressed to the Principal Personnel Officers Committee of the Armed Forces instead of issuing to the chiefs directly.
In June 2018, the Army said posts of seven new principal directors, in addition to the four existing ones, and 36 new directors had been sanctioned for the AFHQ-CS cadre “without any functional requirement”. The scathing seven-page Army letter, also marked to defence ministry (MoD), Department of Personnel and Training, Department of Expenditure (finance ministry), UPSC and others stated: “Creation of these unwanted/surplus posts is not only a violation of PMO’s directive on ‘minimum government and maximum governance, but also a drain on public funds and a recurring loss to the state.”. The AFHQ-CS was created as an internal Group B secretariat support cadre for the armed forces in 1968. “Today, it numbers around 3,000, and its principal directors project themselves as being equivalent to brigadiers/major-generals or joint secretaries of IAS,” said an officer.
The strongly-worded protest is a symptom of the wider resentment in the armed forces, who contend the civilian bureaucracy has worked over the years to systematically downgrade their status, rank, pay and equivalence. Officers say the recently-concluded AFHQ-CS cadre restructuring will create “serious functional problems” in the workings of the hierarchy-driven Army, Navy and IAF Hqs. The indifference to armed forces personnel and India’s lack of compassion for its military veterans was obvious when on 14th August 2015 Delhi police had manhandled/lathi charged Indian Military veterans, and even plucked medals from their shirts. They were protesting for the implementation of the long pending demand of One Rank One Pension (OROP), and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised to resolve the issue. It is almost a decade that the retired Indian armed forces persons have been struggling that irrespective of the year of retirement, the pension on retirement should be same of one rank.
