NB: The Indian Army has always been the most visibly secular part of the Indian establishment; commanding maximum trust among the public in times of communal unrest. It is a tragic and extremely dangerous move on the part of the ruling party to try and influence the Armed Forces with their political ideology. It is not good for the country and not good for the men and women in uniform. DS
Rahul Bedi
The Supreme Court may have declined to reinstate Lieutenant Samuel Kamalesan, but its order will matter little unless the Army itself reasserts its professional centre and separates personal or political beliefs from its institutional role.
Chandigarh: The 2021 dismissal of Lieutenant Samuel Kamalesan – a Christian officer who refused to enter his armoured regiment’s temple and gurdwara sanctums – has dragged the religiously diverse Indian Army’s most sensitive internal fault line back to the surface, after the Supreme Court’s refusal last week to reinstate him.
For years, this long-ignored but troubling fault line was acknowledged privately but never addressed openly, continually side-lined under the guise of sensitivity and institutional caution. But Kamalesan’s removal – now seen as more than merely the dismissal of an officer on broadly religious grounds – has forced the issue into the open, stirring unease across the force and prompting guarded observations from senior veterans.
Consequently, their recent newspaper columns reveal a mounting unease within the armed forces, where the emerging “new normal” increasingly equates patriotism, reliability, and national belonging with visible adherence to the country’s majority religion – a complete inversion of the military’s defining apolitical ethos.
However, as India’s largest, most visible, and socially embedded force – shaped by its centuries-old recruitment pattern – the Army has become far more susceptible than the Indian Air Force or the Indian Navy to political signalling over the past decade.
Unlike the other two services, whose recruitment has traditionally been technocratic, aptitude-driven, and focused on specialised technical roles, the Army draws from a much broader social base with deep regional, caste, and community linkages – a system dating back to the mid-19th century British Raj. This breadth has historically made it more reflective of, and sensitive to, prevailing social and political currents.
Compounding this, the Army operated under far more direct government oversight, engaging constantly with civilian populations through counterinsurgency duties, disaster-relief operations, and repeated interventions to quell unrest. Together, these conditions made it uniquely vulnerable to political messaging and societal pressures in a way that the more insulated, technically oriented Air Force and Navy were not….
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Akhand Bharat shouldn’t enter Indian military gates. Army can’t afford to lose focus
After the truth-shower 