At Indian independence in 1947, the country’s founders worried that the army India inherited—conservative and dominated by officers and troops drawn disproportionately from a few “martial” groups—posed a real threat to democracy. They also saw the structure of the army, with its recruitment on the basis of caste and religion, as incompatible with their hopes for a new secular nation.

India has successfully preserved its democracy, however, unlike many other colonial states that inherited imperial “divide and rule” armies, and unlike its neighbor Pakistan, which inherited part of the same Indian army in 1947. As Steven I. Wilkinson shows, the puzzle of how this happened is even more surprising when we realize that the Indian Army has kept, and even expanded, many of its traditional “martial class” units, despite promising at independence to gradually phase them out.

Army and Nation draws on uniquely comprehensive data to explore how and why India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. It uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy. Wilkinson goes further to ask whether, in a rapidly changing society, these structures will survive the current national conflicts over caste and regional representation in New Delhi, as well as India’s external and strategic challenges.

This is the most important book to have appeared on the Indian armed forces in more than four decades.

Steven I. Wilkinson is Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University.

“Army and Nation complements and, in many ways, surpasses other classic books on the Indian army. One of the signal contributions of the book is Wilkinson’s painstaking collection, collation, analysis, and presentation of quantitative information. Nothing remotely comparable exists.”

—Srinath Raghavan, author of 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh.

“There has been nothing like Army and Nation in the last forty years, which is astonishing given the importance of the army in India. Wilkinson details the ways in which India made many changes that prevent the kind of army actions we see in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other states. There are many lessons here, both to help Indians better understand their own democracy, and for other nations.”

—Stephen P. Cohen, author of The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation