Part 2 - Ji-Huzoor in Uniform

The haanji syndrome described in Part One has its most consequential expressions inside India’s armed forces — in a staff college where an enduring question has been to educate or merely train, in commands that hang on to the hierarchies India seeks to redesign and transcend, and in negotiating rooms where the Army’s authority gradient meets China’s deliberate patience.

The corrective exists. It has been demonstrated historically and recommended doctrinally. It requires political understanding before institutional will — and both together before either alone will suffice.

A colonial design, not a cultural trait

The British invested heavily in training the Indian Army as a tactical force while deliberately retaining strategic and operational level education as a colonial preserve. Indian officers were barred from the Military Operations Directorate until 1945. The highest rank envisioned for an Indian was battalion command. When Wellington was established, one of the founding Commandants Maj Gen Lentaigne urged that it become a genuine inter-services staff college — and needed Lord Mountbatten’s personal intervention to achieve even that partial ambition. His parting advice to his successor was to cut the syllabus and make time for research and discussion. It was not taken.

The institution that independence inherited was designed to produce tacticians obedient to a command hierarchy, not strategists capable of independent operational judgment. It has not yet fully decided to become something else. This is not a cultural trait. It is an institutional inheritance built for specific imperial purposes — preventing horizontal solidarity, concentrating strategic thinking in British hands, producing reliable regimental officers rather than independent strategic minds. We received it. We have not yet redesigned it.

Wellington, the ACR pen, and ji-huzoor by design

Nowhere is this inheritance more consequential than at the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington. Longitudinal studies of officers there, including David O. Smith’s work for the Stimson Center, point to directive pedagogy, deference upward from students to Directing Staff (DS) to Senior Instructor (SI) to Chief Instructor (CI) and Commandant, and a curriculum that rewards conformity over Critical Thinking (CT). The structural reason is plain. The Commandant is an Army appointment that has not rotated across services. The entire pedagogical authority of the institution — including the Annual Confidential Report, the instrument that can accelerate or end a career — sits in Army hands. An officer who questions the professional views the institution imposes is not being courageous. He is being imprudent before a pen that holds real career consequence.

The pedagogy compounds this. Staff solutions — the greens — were the institutional templates against which syndicate work was measured. Over time officially challenged and frowned upon, they survived in practice through the Basic DS brief issued ahead of each exercise to Syndicate DS — cut-and-paste descendants of the greens that notionally no longer existed. Deference to that framing was the path of least resistance through the Staff College and beyond. The implicit lesson absorbed across a year at Wellington was the same one the authority gradient teaches everywhere else: say haanji, align with the brief, ride the boat.

The resistance to change has been institutional rather than incidental. An interface with the late Dr M.R. Srinivasan, former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, first forced the introspection. On learning of my three-tenure passage through Wellington’s portals, he observed that I must undoubtedly have been affected by inbreeding. The observation stung because it was precise — and it sent me into the literature on andragogy and CT as the core of Professional Military Education (PME). What followed was an attempt to introduce CT into Wellington’s curriculum — first the Naval Wing, then the Faculty Development Programme (FDP) that each DS was required to undergo. For a period it held. Then a new Commandant took the chair and remarked on file that the CT syllabi appeared to be a lot of English with nothing new or novel. That remark was not an aberration. It was the institutional reflex made visible.

Yet the effort continued — returning annually after retirement in 2017 to anchor a capsule on Creative, Analytical and Innovative Thinking through to 2023. In a presentation to the faculty chaired by the Commandant, I put the case directly: what prevailing pedagogical methods were doing to constrain critical thinking, and what the institution was losing by treating training as the leitmotif rather than pursuing higher order learning. The presentation was heard. It did not land. The invitations have not resumed.

A capsule is not a curriculum. A visiting speaker is not a tenured faculty member. And enthusiasm is not institutional design.

An institution that streams its Commandants through a single non-rotational apex, with a pedagogy that prizes received knowledge over independent analysis, is not producing strategists. It is reproducing itself.

There is a direct line from this to the authority gradient in operations. Operationally educated staff are the institutional check on commanders — as Lt Col James Allason demonstrated by keeping Lord Mountbatten’s less than practical ideas under check at HQ SEAC in World War II. When staff officers are not educated to think operationally and independently, that check disappears. The ji-huzoor of the Wellington classroom becomes the ji-huzoor at every higher echelon.

The Agniveer scheme illustrates this at the apex. Professional dissent from within the services was not overridden directly. It was sufficient to wait. Personnel rotation eventually produced Chiefs more amenable to the agenda, and a partially thought-through scheme moved forward without the stress-testing that dissenting professional judgment might have enforced. Those who wait are rewarded, those who dissent are rotated out, and the institution’s memory is shorter than its ambitions. That is the authority gradient operating at the highest level of military command.

The ANC lesson: ji-huzoor in structural form

The same dynamic reproduced itself at the Andaman and Nicobar Command — India’s only joint command and the closest thing we have to a laboratory for testing whether the three services can actually work together. I served as Chief of Staff there between 2012 and 2014, supporting three successive CsinC drawn from each of the three services in rotation. The rotation was right. But the structural ambiguities that surrounded it were never resolved — and in a high power-distance system, unresolved structural ambiguity is never neutral. It is filled by the gradient. Deference flows upward. Parochialism flows outward.

The mission gets subordinated to the mood of the apex.

The problem was architectural. Reporting lines, command authority, and the question of who could speak with institutional weight to whom — these were left formally unresolved, resolved informally through the gradient, case by case, tenure by tenure. The result was a joint headquarters that reproduced single-service hierarchy in the spaces the joint architecture had not filled.

The Inter-Services Organisations (Command, Control and Discipline) Act 2023 carries an impressive title — Command, Control and Discipline named explicitly, promising comprehensive architectural resolution of what two decades of ANC experience had left ambiguous. The body is more modest. At its core the Act gave commanders disciplinary powers over personnel of other services. Command and Control in the joint headquarters sense — whose ACR pen shapes whose career, how authority flows across service lines, who holds independent professional responsibility to the mission — remain as unresolved as before. An Act that delivers Discipline while leaving the finer architecture of Command and Control hollow does not flatten the gradient. It gives it new administrative dress and an impressive title to shelter behind. The structural anomalies persist — not because the legislation was poorly drafted but because institutions absorb legislative intent into existing gradient patterns when the underlying culture and pedagogy remain unchanged.

The corrective is the Prussian military marriage of the commander and his Chief of Staff — in which the Chief of Staff is not a coordinator but a professional counterweight, expected to dissent formally and in certain circumstances to override. Dissent is not left to personal courage. It is built into the architecture. What has not been in place is the pedagogical foundation that would make it work — officers who arrive at a joint headquarters having actually practised horizontal challenge and the confidence to tell a commander from another service that his single-service instinct needs review and restraint against the doctrine of the other services. Wellington and India’s other PME institutions do not produce those officers at scale.

The need for a professional counterweight does not stop at the level of CINCAN and COS. It extends to the apex of the joint military structure itself. The CDS, it should be noted, is a staff appointment rather than a commander — he advises and coordinates but does not hold operational command over the three services, whose chiefs retain that authority within their respective services. The disciplinary reach the ISA Act extends to the CDS across services is therefore somewhat academic: the more fundamental question of how joint operational authority is exercised, and who provides independent professional scrutiny of the CDS’s own advisory role, was never addressed.

The Naresh Chandra Task Force saw this clearly and recommended a permanent Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff mechanism — an independent integrating voice with the standing to represent the joint perspective against single-service pulls at the advisory apex. The recommendation was not implemented. The CDS was appointed without the supporting architecture that would give the office institutional balance rather than institutional dominance. A single advisory apex, no independent check, and the gradient flowing entirely upward — the same structure the essay has diagnosed at Wellington, at ANC, and in the negotiating room, now operating at the level where the consequences are greatest of all.

This structural gap at the advisory apex matters urgently because India now proposes to scale the joint command model into Theatre Commands. We are attempting to build at scale what we have not resolved at prototype. The gradient problems at ANC — unresolved command architecture filled by deference and parochialism — will not disappear at Theatre Command level. They will be larger, more consequential, and harder to correct once institutionalised across the entire force structure. That is the lesson ANC’s experience offers — available since the command was created, reinforced by the limitations of the ISA Act 2023, and not yet taken.

Gradient calibration: a design choice

The Indian Air Force (IAF) offers instructive if complicated evidence that gradient calibration is a choice rather than a fate. Its practice of address by name rather than honorific below Squadron Leader level produces somewhat flatter interpersonal gradients than the Army’s — and in some aspects the Navy’s, as I observed in service. These are deliberate institutional choices and they matter.

But the IAF also illustrates that partial reforms reproduce the gradient in new forms when the underlying sub-cultural hierarchy is left unaddressed. Within the service a pronounced pecking order operates — the fighter stream at the apex, ground duty officers in subordination despite their operational indispensability. When the fighter stream sought a special pay band before a Pay Commission, the sub-cultural gradient expressed itself as formal institutional claim. Ground duty officers — essential to every sortie the fighters flew — met it with limited organised resistance. Luttwak and Shamir, writing on the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the IDF, observe that older officers whose future is shorter than their past are far more likely to demand perpetuation of their branch’s iconic platforms — denying funds for new capabilities even while calling for innovation everywhere. The gradient does not only constrain dissent. It shapes resource allocation and operational capability for decades.

The view heard in some quarters — more often in Army circles — that the rank and file of the IAF are somehow less soldierly because of flatter interpersonal habits conflates gradient flatness with lack of discipline. Even the straightest bearing extends only to the parade ground. Flatter authority gradients in the cockpit did not produce undisciplined crews. They produced crews that spoke up when the aircraft was in danger. The question is not whether the rank and file stand straighter on parade. It is whether the institution produces people who can say, clearly and without career consequence, that the plan is wrong. On that measure, the easier ways deserve examination across all three services, not just one.

The gradient is not fixed. But neither is it easily or uniformly chosen. The choice is always structural before it is cultural, and always available to institutions that decide to make it.

The armed forces below the officer corps — from JCOs who hold their own form of presidential commission through to NCOs, SNCOs, Senior Sailors, and the wider ranks — inhabit distinct institutional and social worlds with their own gradient dynamics and their own increasingly articulate voice. This essay confines itself to the officer corps. But India’s democratic evolution, rising education levels, and social media awareness mean that the gradient below the officer corps will not remain an internal institutional matter indefinitely. That conversation is coming. It is better initiated from within than waited out.

Border negotiations: where the gradient meets the table

The LAC border talks carry the military’s authority gradient directly into the diplomatic space. Negotiations and flag meetings are conducted across multiple military levels simultaneously — Border Personnel Meetings at battalion and brigade, Division and Corps Commander talks, and working mechanism consultations at the highest levels. At every tier, officers formed in a system that rewards reporting satisfaction upward sit across from tightly briefed Chinese counterparts with explicit mandates and limited personal latitude. The gradient problem is not concentrated at one level. It is replicated at each one.

Beijing is comfortable with endless process — staging small apparent concessions, presenting softened principles as movement, pocketing any reciprocal flexibility. The Indian side faces dual pressure at every level: find something to announce, keep the atmosphere warm, avoid returning empty-handed. We search for closure. They bank our positions and wait.

Four counter-gradients

Rotate Wellington’s Commandant across all three services. NDA, CDM, and NDC already do this. Wellington’s Army-only model is not structural necessity but deliberate institutional choice — an older inheritance from Quetta that its own sister institutions have already moved beyond.

Introduce a Dean of Academics with independent tenure and a reporting line outside the Commandant’s authority. Wellington already has a Madras University affiliation that functions as ceremonial validation rather than independent scrutiny — classic haanji moments in which the institution performs academic respectability and the visitors conduct their review within the frame provided. A Dean of Academics whose appointment runs through the university rather than the military chain would convert that relationship from a ceremonial visit into a structural check.

Implement the Naresh Chandra Task Force recommendation for a Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff mechanism. The CDS as currently constituted is a staff appointment without a formal institutional counterweight — no independent voice with the standing to provide adversarial scrutiny of the advisory apex itself. A permanent Chairman Joint Chiefs or Vice CDS with an explicit mandate to represent the joint perspective against single-service pulls would give the office the institutional balance it currently lacks. The gradient that flows unchecked upward through Wellington, through ANC, and through the negotiating room flows upward at the apex too. The ISA Act gave the CDS disciplinary reach. It did not give India the counterweight that would make the CDS’s own judgment subject to the same professional scrutiny the essay demands at every level below.

Establish explicit negotiating mandates across all levels of military interlocutors in border talks. The battalion commander at a Border Personnel Meeting and the Corps Commander at a flag meeting need the same thing the First Officer needs in the cockpit: a formal institutionally backed licence to hold a position that supersedes the pressure to generate atmospherics — at every tier, not just the apex.

The haanji essay argued that the decision to redesign is institutional before it is cultural, and always available. In uniform, that decision has specific addresses: the Commandant's appointment at Wellington, the academic architecture within it, the counterweight mechanism at the CDS level, and the briefing architecture for border negotiations at every level. None requires a transformation of Indian culture. Each requires institutions to decide that their mission matters more than their inherited hierarchy.

That decision has been available for decades. The only thing that has made it unavailable is choosing not to make it.

For readers who want to go deeper

- Sudhir Pillai, Lessons in Jointness from India’s Andaman and Nicobar Command, Chapter 17 in Force in Statecraft, National Defence College. Practitioner’s account of institutional socio-centrism, the Prussian military marriage of commander and COS, and structural barriers to genuine jointness at ANC.

- Sudhir Pillai, “Theaterisation Reform is Stuck on Ranks and Roles,” The Print, September 2025. How unresolved semiotics of command authority are blocking India’s most ambitious military reform.

- Sudhir Pillai, “Change with Times: Indian Professional Military Education System Needs Urgent Reform,” The Force Magazine, November 2020. Wellington’s pedagogical failures, resistance to Critical Thinking, and the case for genuine joint educational establishment under rotational command.

- Sudhir Pillai, “Schooled to Think,” The Force Magazine, January 2018. Historical analysis of Indian PME from colonial origins, arguing for operational level education as the foundation of strategic leadership.

- David O. Smith, The Wellington Experience, Stimson Center, 2020. Longitudinal study documenting conformity, deference to Directing Staff, and PME culture in the Indian Army.

- Tony Kausal, The Falcon and the Mirage: Managing for Combat Effectiveness, DAU Press, 2001. Comparative US-French acquisition study using Hofstede’s power-distance framework.

- Geert Hofstede, “Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context.” India as a high power-distance case with direct implications for institutional voice.

- John L. Graham and N. Mark Lam, “The Chinese Negotiation,” Harvard Business Review, 2003. Chinese bargaining style: deliberate ambiguity, staged concessions, exploitation of the other side’s need for closure.

- Edward Luttwak and Eitan Shamir, The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the IDF. On flat organisations, reservist-driven cultural porosity, sub-cultural hierarchy, and how seniority bias systematically distorts resource allocation and inhibits genuine innovation. An instructive structural contrast with legacy standing armies.