ROYAL Naval Air Services pilot Christopher Draper of the Great War fame would lace his idiosyncrasies with breath-catching heroics and a keen sense of fun.

One morning while flying towards the front lines Draper, not known as a keeper of military regulations, flew under a bridge in full view of the troops who cheered so heartily that he repeated the stunt wherever possible. This earned him his nickname The Mad Major.

Someone appropriated the nickname and applied it to the identikit of an imagined reckless officer who, nudged by his zealous hallucinations, could single-handedly trigger a nuclear calamity. Stanley Kubrick fleshed out such a character in Dr Strangelove, a seminal film on the world’s dangerous flirtation with the bomb.

The recent arrests by Indian police of former army men and the rare grilling of at least one serving officer, a lieutenant colonel, has raised entirely new concerns about a mutated version of lurking rogue officers tethered to the ideology of Hindutva. The men being questioned for alleged links to a cult-like campaign were said to target those they perceived as anti-Hindu and to not hesitate to use high explosives they smuggled from army warehouses.

The probe has thus signalled a wider hunt for a few or even many mad majors lurking deep within the military structures in their palpably notorious avatar as religious nationalists. The thought not only haunts the secular leadership of the Indian army but has also raised the prospect of the country’s republican constitution itself coming in the mad majors’ crosshairs. Both the defence minister and the army chief have favoured a thorough investigation.

The challenge could be forbidding though. India may have been spared a Gen Ziaul Haq who consciously planted religious vigilantes in state institutions, above all in the armed forces, but the country’s zigzag ride with democracy has prompted analysts to detect nascent similarities. Dotting the path of democracy since its inception were debilitating and still-raging encounters in which the army was asked to train its firepower at fellow Indians.

The ethnic pattern of this engagement is even more worrying. Christians in the northeast, Muslims in Kashmir and Sikhs in Punjab have found themselves at the wrong end of the equation. The army is currently training paramilitary commandos to hunt Maoist rebels who mostly happen to be impoverished tribespeople and Dalits. They straddle large swathes of the Indian heartland.

Being the coercive arm of the state, and jealously preserving its monopoly over instruments of violence, any army is like the other. But it is a fiction that armies are impervious to political ideologies. The ideological grooming of a Pakistani soldier, for instance, who defends his nation and honour would be different from that of his Indian counterpart. But being creatures of state power, soldiers are primarily required to defend the worldview of the ruling elite that wields hegemony over that state power.

And the objectives of the state can change. There could be hardly another logical reason why Pakistani soldiers today hunt those they counted as organic partners just the other day. If the U-turn took its toll it was most probably factored into the risky manoeuvre. The Indian army too saw violent desertions after it waded into Sikhdom’s holiest shrine in 1984. Most armies face sensitivities of cultures and ethnicities that forge them into a fighting force. Their strength is thus also their weakness.

While soldiers have a dreadful reputation in Pakistan or even Bangladesh for obvious reasons, the domestic response to the Indian soldier is mixed. On the one hand they terrorise citizens in Kashmir and northeastern India but they are also regarded as a neutral enforcer of law and order in the context of, say, Hindu-Muslim riots. In the early days of the republic’s perennial religious tensions, Muslims, for example, dreaded the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) in Uttar Pradesh.

Later the communal virus had penetrated the state police forces too. Federally funded paramilitary units were also not immune to it. But much of the bloodshed in Gujarat, it is thought, would have been averted had the state government deployed army units that were kept on standby.

It is in this context that the investigations into what have come to be known as the Malegaon blasts have thrown up some seriously worrying facts. The blast killed six Muslim worshippers. Other incidents are being probed. The terror trail led investigators to Hindu priestess Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur.

Others, including a retired army major, were apprehended. Lt Col Shrikant Prasad Purohit, being grilled by the Anti-Terror Squad of the Maharashtra Police with the army’s support, is a serving officer in the Military Intelligence. All of the suspects are associated with Abhinav Bharat (New India), modelled on an organisation founded several decades ago by anti-colonial Hindu nationalist leader Veer Savarkar.

According to a survey by Outlook magazine the organisation’s activities reveal its virulent character. In one pamphlet, it exhorts members to seek revenge for the “killing of millions of Hindus over several centuries”. It has also organised several ‘conventions’ where it described Muslims as ‘harma shatrus’ (enemies of the faith). More in tune with its militant character, one of the outfit’s slogans reads, “Kshama yachna nahin, ab to ran hoga, sangharsh bada bhishan hoga” (No mercy or apology, now it will be war; the battle will be extremely intense).

The question is not whether rightwing Hindu fanatics have penetrated the Indian armed forces. It is evident that the fear is very genuine. Given the Indian army’s ethnic and cultural composition a full-blown religious sway may not however be possible. Yet, what happens when the civilian authority wielding state power itself subverts the constitution as has happened elsewhere as also in India in 1975? And what if the BJP, whose supporters have idolised the Nazis and which has an outside chance of ruling the country tomorrow, links up with the rogue officers?

When in 1918 the Royal Naval Air Services merged into the Royal Air Force, Draper refused to wear the new blue RAF uniforms preferring his Naval blacks. It is worrying but quite possibly true that the mad majors of Indian army have a preference for saffron. Hopefully there aren’t many troops to cheer them as they did Draper’s defiance of military conduct.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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