Protests On India's New Military Recruitment System Enter Day Two, Protesters Burn Train Cars

Ilustrasi military India. (Wikimedia Commons/Antonio Milena)

JAKARTA - Protesters in India threw stones at police and set train carriages on fire on Friday as demonstrations against the new military recruitment process raged for a second day, police said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government this week announced an overhaul of the recruitment process for the 1.38 million-strong armed forces, aiming to bring in more people on short four-year contracts, to lower the average age of personnel.

However, many recruits object, saying they should be allowed to serve more than four years. Opposition parties and some members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party say the system will lead to more unemployment in a country grappling with unemployment.

"They have blocked trains in 10 places today," Sanjay Singh, a senior police official in Bihar, told Reuters as quoted on June 17, adding more than 100 people had been arrested in statewide protests on Thursday.

Hundreds of people also gathered in the southern city of Secunderabad, to pelt police with stones, in a sign that the protests had spread.

"They also set fire to property at the Secunderabad railway station," said police official AR Srinivas.

Earlier, police opened fire in the air on Thursday to push back a crowd of stone-throwers at a satay north of Haryana. Protesters gathered again on Friday, setting train carriages on fire at at least two stations in eastern Bihar state and disrupting train services, police said.

The new recruitment system, called Agnipath or 'fireway' in Hindi, will bring in men and women between the ages of 17-and-a-half and 21 for four-year terms in the non-officer rank, with only one-quarter retained for longer periods. long.

Soldiers have previously been recruited by the army, navy and air force separately, and typically served up to 17 years, for the lowest rank.

In addition, the government on Friday also announced a one-time extension of the maximum entry age into the scheme to 23, since recruitment has been frozen for the past two years, mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The government has decided that a one-time waiver will be granted for the proposed recruitment cycle for 2022," the defense ministry said in a statement.

The Indian Armed Forces alone aim to recruit around 46,000 people under the new system this year.

This sheer obsession with “#Agni” https://t.co/dWFSLQ4ymU

— Ritam Vajpayi (@Vajpayi_) June 17, 2022