End of Colonial Practice: Buddy System to End in Indian Army

Among the many institutional legacies that independent India inherited from its colonial past, few were as persistent or as quietly corrosive as the "sahayak" or "buddy" system within the Indian Army — a practice in which enlisted men could be assigned as personal attendants to senior officers, a vestige of the British regimental orderly tradition that survived decades after independence.

In 2012, reports that the Army intended to wind down the practice were met with approval from military reform advocates and soldiers' rights groups, who had long argued that assigning trained soldiers to domestic duties was incompatible with the dignity of military service. Enlisted soldiers were trained, at considerable public expense, to defend the nation — not to polish officers' boots or serve tea.

The system had persisted partly through institutional inertia, partly because it served those with the authority to change it, and partly because reform of military traditions tends to be slower than reform in other domains. Senior officers who had themselves benefited from the arrangement during their careers sometimes lacked the perspective — or the incentive — to view it critically.

Critics also pointed to a class dimension. The officers who benefited from domestic service were drawn disproportionately from more privileged social backgrounds; the soldiers assigned to serve them were often from rural areas where military service represented one of the few paths to steady employment and social mobility. The arrangement thus replicated, within a supposedly egalitarian institution, the hierarchies of the society outside.

The promised end, however, never fully arrived. A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence had already asked the Army to abolish the "demeaning and humiliating" practice in 2010, as the Air Force and Navy had done; yet the Army continued to defend sahayaks as providing essential support to officers in peace and war, and in 2017 the government told Parliament that no proposal to scrap the system was under consideration. The system was scaled back at the margins — restrictions on sahayaks serving retired officers, talk of civilian staff at peace stations — but the core practice endured.

The 2012 moment remains worth revisiting — not as a turning point that happened, but as a reminder of how a reform with broad public sympathy could stall for years against institutional resistance.