Among the many institutional legacies that independent India inherited from its colonial past, few were as persistent or as quietly corrosive as the "buddy system" within the Indian Army — a practice in which senior officers could assign enlisted men as personal domestic servants, a vestige of the British regimental tradition that had survived decades after independence should have rendered it obsolete.

The decision to formally abolish this practice was met with broad approval from military reform advocates and soldiers' rights groups who had long argued that the system was incompatible with the dignity of military service and the constitutional values of a democratic republic. Enlisted soldiers were trained, at considerable public expense, to defend the nation — not to polish officers' boots or serve tea.

The buddy system had persisted partly through institutional inertia, partly because it served the interests of 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 abolition was framed officially as a modernization measure and a recognition that professional soldiers deserved to be treated as such. For those who had served in the role, it was something more personal: a long-overdue acknowledgment that their service to the nation did not include serving the private comfort of individual officers.