HISTORICALLY, the world over, armies have raped and pillaged their quarries wherever they could. Their victims’ responses were varied. They would give a good fight where possible or internalise the affront into deep recesses of memory often with its cultural accoutrements intact.

“Dahijaar ke naati” was Najman Bua’s preferred curse for male adults who dared to annoy her. Najman, who migrated to Lucknow to earn a living as a domestic, had belonged to the peasant stock of subsistence cultivators from Rudauli, in the vicinity of Ayodhya in northern India.

Her forebears had converted to Islam from a lowly order in the Hindu caste heap. Years after her death at the ripe old age of 95, I tried to track some of the Avadhi phrases she would lace her speech with. Dahijaar ke naati, it turned out, was a common insult among Hindu peasants whose fields were pillaged and women taken by force by Turko-Afghan soldiers most of whom, it seems, sported beards. Dahijaar was an Avadhi variant of daadhi jaley, an angry description of soldiers with ‘burnt beards’, and naati meant an offspring. “You son of a Muslim invader” was thus how a Muslim maid in northern India would often taunt her male tormentors.

In the strife-torn regions of South Asia, cultural spaces are filled with bitter metaphors and unflattering cultural expressions about uniformed soldiers who came to pillage citing lofty causes. Kashmir, Balochistan, Bangladesh, Jaffna, among some of the regions that come to mind, are either undergoing their trauma or preserving the memory of their unspeakable humiliation at the hands of armies who claimed to be their benefactors.

Stories out of Abu Ghraib of torture and brutalities are not unique to Iraq or its American occupiers. We don’t have to scan too deep to find South Asian dungeons littered with similar examples of violence inflicted by the armies on their people. It is no one’s claim that all soldiers are alike and therefore potentially inhuman. There have been excellent reports about Indian troops working with overseas missions as UN peacekeepers. Pakistani and Bangladeshi soldiers too are in demand.

Yet not too long ago a UN inquiry found a Pakistani peacekeeper in the Democratic Republic of Congo was involved in smuggling gold. This followed reports that a Pakistani contingent was selling gold and guns between 2005 and 2006 to Congolese militia groups they were meant to disarm. There must be something about this particular posting that reports came last week of how three Indian Army officers deputed to the UN peacekeeping force in Congo have been accused of rape.

The Indian Express said a lieutenant colonel and two majors of the Indian Army, seconded to the North Kivu brigade of the Mission of the UN in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC), were detained last week by South African police after a woman resident of Plettenberg Bay in Pretoria charged them with rape. Latest reports say the woman had withdrawn her charges but the men have been told by their defence ministry to return home.

Pakistan’s Ayesha Siddiqa has written a remarkably well-researched book on the all-pervasive political economy of Pakistan’s armed forces and the corruption that it spawns. Unfortunately, there is no matching account of the unspoken rot on the Indian side of the fence as the army here is still regarded as a holy cow, even more so within the community of defence and strategic think thanks.

It isn’t as though the occasional scandal has not jolted this absolute faith in the integrity of the stereotyped brave and selfless soldier. From faking ‘enemy’ casualties in Siachen in search of gallantry awards to the latest revelations of how the entire Battle of Longewala, one of the grand memories from the 1971 war with Pakistan, was invented by officers of the Indian Army to win state laurels.

The Battle of Longewala is part of army folklore, says the writer of the expose in Delhi’s Tehelka magazine. “That India snatched victory from the jaws of defeat is a story oft told.”

Air Marshal M.S. Bawa now gives an entirely different account about the Alpha Company, whose tales of exaggerated valour inspired the popular movie Border. Says Bawa, all fire and brimstone: “They gave a blow-by-blow account to the defence minister in Longewala — when there was no blow. I landed in Longewala on Dec 5 after our Hunters had crippled the Pakistani tanks and Chandpuri (of the Indian Army) fell at my feet and thanked us for saving their lives. They were sitting in a trench, heads down.”

The Longewala episode apart, the fact that troops are known to murder innocent civilians to win fame and credit has dented the army’s image everywhere and in India at least there is a virtual drought of young men choosing the forces for a career. Of course the dented image is not the only reason for the once coveted job losing the lure. The Economic Times carried a discussion recently captioned: ‘Attracting Talent: Indian Army has a marketing problem’.

Retired Lt-Gen V.R. Raghavan, adviser to the Delhi Policy Group, and Commodore Uday Bhaskar, former director of the state-funded Institute for Defence Strategy and Analyses, gave different explanations for the problem.

“The army has four main criteria for selection to the officer cadre,” Raghavan said. These were education, aptitude, medical & physical condition and moral character (read no criminal record). Aptitude and leadership traits are judged through proven psychological tests, where not many make the grade.”

Accordingly, he says, “the challenge of the military is not of marketing with high pay scales, nor in selling adventure and excitement like tourism ads. The challenge lies in restructuring, to attract young officers to fill the 11,000 vacancies. This is best done by expanding the infrastructure to train officers for short service, by accepting a marginally lower standard at entry, and paying a truly rewarding retirement package after five years’ service.” What Lt-Gen Raghavan did not clarify was that lowering the hurdles could work both ways, and may in fact deepen the existing rot.

Commodore Bhaskar says the fact that the Indian Army has a shortage of little under a quarter of its sanctioned strength, “is a stark and irrefutable indicator that the Indian state is unable to attract the kind of talent required.” He blames it on a marketing problem “by way of being (un)able to convincingly persuade the qualified Indian youth to don uniform, at a time when there are many more attractive job opportunities (which is a familiar socio-economic and HR pattern with economies in transition) but the onus I am afraid is less with the Army and more with the government of India”.

Bhaskar’s assessment of the Indian Army’s headache reveals a stark admission of the reality that much of the idea of a selfless soldier is a contrived myth, with or without the burnt beard that fanned so much anger in Najman Bua.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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