Rank Injustice
ON 12 JANUARY 2017 , three days before Army Day, Lance Naik Yagya Pratap Singh, then posted with the Forty-Second Infantry Brigade of the Indian Army, in Dehradun, uploaded a video on Facebook. It soon went viral, and was picked up by news channels. The mobile-phone footage showed the soldier in camouflage fatigues, facing the camera with squared shoulders, his image blurry but his voice sharp and clear.
In June the previous year, Singh said in the video, he had addressed a letter to the prime minister, the president, the defence minister, the home minister and the Supreme Court. The letter called for an end to the practice of assigning soldiers to officers as sahayaks—attendants. He described the practice as exploitative. Soldiers trained to fight the enemy, he said, should not be made to polish their officers’ shoes or walk their dogs.
Singh said that his brigade had received an official query from the prime minister’s office regarding his complaint. Ever since, his commanders had begun exerting tremendous pressure on him, repeatedly questioning and abusing him. It was enough to make the average soldier kill himself or take some other “wrong step,” he added, “but I will not do that. I am a soldier, and as a soldier, I will not dishonour my uniform by hurting myself or someone else.”
Earlier that morning, Singh had received a charge sheet and a summons for a court martial. “I appeal to Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi that all I did was write an application,” he said. “What wrong have I done that they are forming a committee to charge-sheet and court-martial me?”
The next day, several news channels aired videos of jawans—enlisted soldiers—washing a car, walking a dog and shifting gunny bags from a military truck into a house. Singh later told a military court that he had shot the videos at his brigade’s headquarters. The dog, he said, belonged to Brigadier Ajay Pasbola, the brigade’s commander. The car belonged to Major R Richard, the camp commander, while the gunny bags were being moved into Pasbola’s father’s house. In his viral video, Singh had named Pasbola and Richard among the officers who were harassing him.
Singh’s video appeared at an especially sensitive moment for the security forces. A few days earlier, Tej Bahadur Yadav, a jawan in the Border Security Force, had uploaded a video showing the poor quality of food the force was being served. Yadav’s video pricked the breast-beating worship of the security forces that had taken over the popular media. Following Singh’s example, several jawans from the army and paramilitary forces also spoke out about being forced to perform menial labour for their officers.
Besides Singh, two other soldiers received the most media attention. On 24 February, the news website The Quint published a video story that showed numerous jawans at the Deolali cantonment, near Nashik, revealing details about the sahayak system. The jawans alleged that they were made to wash and dry clothes, walk dogs and drive their officers’ wives and children. The videos were shot with a hidden camera and published without the soldiers’ consent, with no precautions to protect their identities other than blurring out their faces.
One of the jawans was Lance Naik Roy Mathew, an artillery gunner with the 214 Rocket Regiment. The following day, Mathew was reported missing and declared absent without leave. On 2 March, he was found dead, hanging in an abandoned barracks about fifty metres from his quarters.
Five days later, Sepoy Sindhav Jogidas Lakhubahi, a jawan in the Army Medical Corps, uploaded a video on social media. He began by apologising to his fellow countrymen and the government, because what he had to say about sahayak work would hurt people’s feelings and the army’s reputation. “Some army officers consider their jawans slaves,” he said. “The jawans are forced to comply. Anyone who speaks up is killed.” Lakhubahi had earlier sent his concerns in writing to the prime minister, the defence minister and the army chief, he said, but to no avail. Instead, once his unit heard about the complaints, his commanders harassed him for a year and instituted two courts of inquiry against him.
Singh’s court martial ended with him being jailed for a month and being demoted to the rank of sepoy, the lowest in the army hierarchy. Following
