Lt Gen N S Raja Subramani’s appointment as India’s next Chief of Defence Staff belongs to a pattern that has hardened since 2016, in which the language of merit has increasingly sat beside political preference and ideological comfort inside New Delhi’s highest military appointments.
Subramani served as the vice chief of the army staff from July 2024 to July 2025, retired on July 31, and was then moved to the National Security Council Secretariat as military adviser in September. Barely months later, he was named to replace Gen Anil Chauhan as CDS when Chauhan completes his extended tenure on May 30, 2026. He has been serving in the national security system under Ajit Doval, and his predecessor followed the same route. Two successive CDSs emerging from the same office, under the same national security architecture, cannot be dismissed as a coincidence.
The rot had begun to show clearly in December 2016, when the Modi government appointed Gen Bipin Rawat as army chief after superseding two more senior lieutenant generals, emphasising that seniority was no longer sacrosanct, and the criteria for deep selection would remain largely inside the government’s pocket.
Then came the rule change. After Rawat’s death, the CDS post remained vacant for more than nine months. In June 2022, New Delhi widened eligibility for the job to include serving and retired three-star officers below 62, clearing the way for Chauhan, a retired lieutenant general, to return as a four-star CDS.
India’s military was once presented as one of the last institutions insulated from party politics. That insulation is now being eroded quietly, not through a single masterstroke, but through incremental normalisation that operates through supersession, vacancy, rule changes, recall, extension and another NSCS elevation. The saffronisation of command does not need a slogan painted on a cantonment wall. It can arrive through files, notifications and appointments that make political palatability look like merit.
The danger is regional as much as institutional. In a nuclear-armed state, military advice filtered through ideological comfort and personal proximity risks rewarding conformity over candour and loyalty over strategic clarity. Civilian control of the military is a democratic necessity. Personalised control over military succession is something else altogether.
