Colonels of Cricket Field

Maj Gen Sanjeev Dogra (Retd)

sanjeev662006@gmail.com

Southampton, 5 June 2019. India are playing South Africa in the World Cup, and MS Dhoni takes his place behind the stumps wearing gloves that will soon interest the International Cricket Council. On each is a small dagger, the Balidaan badge of the Parachute Regiment's Special Forces. By next morning the ICC has asked for it removed. The BCCI seeks permission; it is refused. The gloves, mercifully, go back to being gloves.

I was born into the Defence, grew up around the uniform and wore it for thirty-seven years, so I watched the controversy differently. What held my attention was a boy, somewhere in a small town far from any cantonment, watching with his family and asking, "What is that dagger on Dhoni's glove?" Whatever answer he got, the uniform had entered his imagination in a way no recruiting advertisement could manage. That boy is the real audience of a peculiar Indian experiment, and it deserves a hard look.

Kapil Dev was commissioned as an honorary Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army in September 2008. Sachin Tendulkar was made an honorary Group Captain of the Indian Air Force in 2010. In November 2011 came Dhoni, attached to 106 Para TA Battalion, alongside the shooter Abhinav Bindra. Neeraj Chopra followed in 2025, a former Subedar Major turned Lieutenant Colonel by a stroke of the President's pen, a journey that in the regular Army takes decades and, usually, a war.

Why do this? The Armed Forces must compete for young attention against cricket, cinema and a thousand other distractions, and the Territorial Army, a force of civilian volunteers, is hardly the first name a teenager thinks of. Cricket is the nearest thing India has to a national religion, and a religion needs a pulpit. Such honours are meant to recognise national achievement, inspire youth towards service, lift morale among soldiers who meet an idol, and shrink the distance between cantonment and citizen.

The mechanics are remarkably painless. An honorary rank is conferred by the President under Para 31 of the Territorial Army Regulations, 1948. It carries no pay, no command, no pension and, fortunately for the recipient, no obligation to explain a missing fuel chit. Nobody sits the Services Selection Board for it. As one who prepares aspirants for that very board, I note with a smile that the SSB, which has turned back many a promising candidate for mumbling in a group discussion, never got to assess Captain Cool.

And once conferred, it tends to stay conferred: Parliament has been told there are no laid-down obligations attached to it, and Indian convention holds that a rank, once given, is never formally retired, so a holder may use it for life. Permanence has its awkward moments. Two years after Mohanlal was commissioned, the Army reportedly looked into his wearing the uniform in a state tourism advertisement, a reminder that a rank held for life must also be lived up to for life.

That smile hides a serious point. A popular impression has grown, helped along by television graphics and breathless captions, that these cricketers could actually be sent to the front, gun in hand, should war break out. This is simply untrue. An honorary rank carries no liability for mobilisation, no operational posting and no command over troops; its holder cannot be ordered to a war zone, cannot lead a patrol, and is not part of the Army's order of battle. Even Dhoni's celebrated stint in Kashmir was a voluntary, closely supervised engagement within his unit's peacetime routine, sentry duty and patrolling, not a combat deployment. He earned proximity and respect there, not a posting to the front. Conflating the two flatters no one: it does not honour the cricketer, who never claimed to be a soldier, and it quietly diminishes those who train for years to carry that risk for real.

Consider, now, the effect on those watching. A national icon in uniform can make the profession of arms look admirable and attainable; the beret, the wings and the salute enter a young imagination, and inspiration often begins as an image before it becomes ambition. But there is a more dangerous lesson too: a young man who sees a Colonel's insignia given for a World Cup may conclude that the road to rank runs through fame rather than years of training. Anyone who has watched candidates struggle through the SSB knows how false that is.

Dhoni remains the case that gives the idea real substance. In 2015 he did his parachute training at Agra and completed the jumps. In 2019, after India's World Cup exit, he stepped away from cricket and served with his battalion in Kashmir, doing sentry duty and patrols and spending Independence Day in Ladakh. A jawan can tell within minutes whether a visitor has come for the photograph or the posting, and by most accounts Dhoni passed. That holds the whole experiment's most important lesson: an honorary rank gains meaning only when its holder chooses to give it some.

But one Dhoni does not make a policy. If the aim is recruitment, did applications to the Territorial Army or the services rise after these conferments? I know of no published evidence that they did. Visibility is high, morale is probably real but anecdotal, and the civil-military bridge is plausible but hard to measure.

The club, moreover, is wider than sport. At the ceremony that honoured Dhoni and Bindra, Dr Deepak Rao, a close-quarter-battle trainer also described as a physician and scientist, became an honorary Major. Academia has its own version through the National Cadet Corps: university vice-chancellors are given the honorary rank of Colonel Commandant and may wear NCC khaki without any military experience. A person whose gravest command has been a Senate meeting may now return a salute on a parade ground.

And so the question of who is left out. There is no woman among the five sportspersons honoured, no hockey player from a sport that gave India eight Olympic golds, and no wrestler, boxer or shuttler; the Navy has honoured no one at all. If ranks follow television ratings rather than Olympic medals, the honour quietly tells young Indians that the nation values fame over discipline. A Mary Kom or a P.V. Sindhu can teach that lesson as powerfully as any batsman.

I once asked a retired Subedar Major, thirty years in uniform, what he made of it all. He did not condemn it outright. "The cricketer's medal is his own," he said, "nobody grudges him the stage." Then he paused. "But when my grandson sees the same three stars on a bat-holder's shoulder that took me twenty-two years to earn, what do I tell him it means?" He was not bitter, only precise, and precision is what this debate usually lacks.

The critics deserve a hearing. Military rank is earned through selection, training, responsibility and risk; hand it out too freely and the currency is diluted. If a cricketer, why not a film star, and if a film star, why not the man who sells the most soap? There is also a charge of tokenism, that the Army borrows glamour while the soldier's pay, equipment and career prospects remain the real questions. I know of no formal survey of opinion; what exists is applause at the ground and murmurs at the mess.

In fairness, the Territorial Army was always built on the idea of the citizen who wears the uniform, and the honorary officer is a ceremonial cousin of that idea, not an alien to it. The real objection is not that civilians wear the badge, but that it is sometimes handed over without any burden at all.

Should the practice continue? Yes, but with three disciplines. First, rarity: reserve it for the summit, an Olympic gold, a World Cup, a world record, since a routine honour stops being one. Second, responsibility: give every recipient a modest charter, a few days each year with troops, school and college visits, a public account of what was done. Third, candour: say plainly that the rank is honorary and non-combatant, so the young understand the difference between wearing the uniform for a day and carrying it for a lifetime.

There is also a better model, one the Army has practised quietly for decades: finding talent early and giving young athletes a job, coaching, facilities and institutional support, through the Army Sports Institute and the wider military sporting system, rather than crowning champions after they win. Neeraj Chopra's journey is what that support can achieve; Colonel Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won Olympic silver in 2004 as a serving officer, not an honorary one. Athletes who genuinely wish to serve could also be offered Territorial Army commissions through ordinary selection, which is what the force was created for. Return to the boy in the small town. If he asks how to earn the dagger on that glove, the real answer must be ready: the National Defence Academy, the SSB, and a great deal of sweat. Rank can be conferred. Respect, as every soldier knows, must be earned.