z:\ ambedkar\vol 08\vol8 03.indd MK SJ+YS 28 9 2013 78
78 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Sepoy is inferior to none; while in point of health, as exhibited by returns, he compares favourably with his neighbours. This has been manifested by the sappers and their followers in the Khyber; and the sappers are of the same race as the Sepoys.”
Hindustan need, therefore, have no apprehension regarding the supply of an adequate fighting force from among its own people. The separation of Pakistan cannot weaken her in that respect.
The Simon Commission drew attention to three features of the Indian Army, which struck them as being special and peculiar to India. It pointed out that the duty of the Army in India was two-fold; firstly, to prevent the independent tribes on the Indian side of the Afghan frontier from raiding the peaceful inhabitants of the plains below. Secondly, to protect India against invasion by countries lying behind and beyond this belt of unorganized territories. The Commission took note of the fact that from 1850 to 1922, there were 72 expeditions against the independent tribes, an average of one a year, and also of the fact that in the countries behind and beyond this belt of unorganized territory, lies the direction from which, throughout the ages, the danger to India’s territorial integrity has come. This quarter is occupied by “States which according to the Commission are not members of the League of Nations” and is, therefore, a greater danger to India now than before. The Commission insisted on emphasizing that these two facts constituted a peculiar feature of the problem of military defence in India and so far as the urgency and extent of the problem is concerned, they are “without parallel elsewhere in the Empire, and constituted a difficulty in developing selfgovernment which never arose in any comparable degree in the case of the self-governing Dominions”.
As a second unique feature of the Indian Army, the Commission observed :
“The Army in India is not only provided and organized to ensure against external dangers of a wholly exceptional character: it is also distributed and habitually used throughout India for the purpose of maintaining or restoring internal peace. In all countries .... the military is not normally employed in this way, and certainly is not