Why no military coup in India and Israel during Cold War?

My point exactly. The IDF is an effective cross-section of the non-Arab, non-Haredi population. You won't get the kind of separation between the military and civilian population needed for the military to back a coup. If the government is that unpopular, it would collapse. The only scenario I can come up with is some sort of insane election rigging scenario or the government trying to disenfranchise large swaths of the electorate, both of which are borderline ASB.
I kind of wonder if this is evolving these days, though. While support for the concept of a civic people's army is high, the combat units are becoming a bit more ideological I guess in ways that they were not formerly (the issue of females singing, for example, has become more prominent), and this is not just a rank and file issue anymore but also with the junior officer corps. Service evasion may be a taboo but that doesn't mean it isn't happening more and more, just in less ostentatious ways. The volunteer army is probably inevitable.

As for a coup, if it was to happen, it would probably come from internal high level type stuff that would represent a coup but perhaps not actually be one. The relative popularity gap between Moshe Dayan and Levi Eshkol in 1967, for example, could lead to a sort of de facto sidelining of Eshkol as PM during the crisis, and could if things get nasty enough be considered a coup of sorts.
 
I kind of wonder if this is evolving these days, though. While support for the concept of a civic people's army is high, the combat units are becoming a bit more ideological I guess in ways that they were not formerly (the issue of females singing, for example, has become more prominent), and this is not just a rank and file issue anymore but also with the junior officer corps. Service evasion may be a taboo but that doesn't mean it isn't happening more and more, just in less ostentatious ways. The volunteer army is probably inevitable.

As for a coup, if it was to happen, it would probably come from internal high level type stuff that would represent a coup but perhaps not actually be one. The relative popularity gap between Moshe Dayan and Levi Eshkol in 1967, for example, could lead to a sort of de facto sidelining of Eshkol as PM during the crisis, and could if things get nasty enough be considered a coup of sorts.

True. It would be very temporary, I think. I normally wouldn't pick Dayan for this, but if he thought Eshkol was making bad decisions during the Six Day War, he might try to sideline him, replace him with a more compliant figure, then go for the PM's seat after the war. He was popular enough that he could have been PM in the right circumstances - and I wish to G-d that he had been.
 
True. It would be very temporary, I think. I normally wouldn't pick Dayan for this, but if he thought Eshkol was making bad decisions during the Six Day War, he might try to sideline him, replace him with a more compliant figure, then go for the PM's seat after the war. He was popular enough that he could have been PM in the right circumstances - and I wish to G-d that he had been.
I don't think the idea of a coup would be accepted anyways, but if it happened, it would be a "soft" one like this.

I do think that with just some of the distasteful arrogance demonstrated regarding the victory of Begin's Likud in 1977 both before and afterwards on the part of the existing establishment, and the resentment regarding Mizrahi voters making a difference in things, that a situation in which electoral irregularities were trumped up (and supported by the judiciary, which depending on who you ask, is still considered infamously left wing and Ashkenazi dominated) and used to deny the chances for a Likud government aren't as far fetched as it would seem, and the tools for accomplishing it might have been there (after all, who made up the military and intelligence leadership and elite combat units of the time? Not Yemenis or Moroccans).

But in general, coups are tricky things, and there is a lot of revulsion at the concept of them in most democracies, whether they are developing or not. The situation would have to be pretty extreme for this to be even possible.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Anyway the question here is, why not India and Israel? The cases are quite different from each other, but I think in addition to valid points such as India's deliberately designed checks and balances and Israel's universal conscription, we have the fact that to put it bluntly neither of them is in the category of a typical Third World nation.

India is of course in most respects a classic case of what Third World means--but its sheer size, and the depth of its democratic traditions despite aberrations protect it from being capable of domination by some colonel funded by a black CIA budget. Had India's founders not taken care to develop an elaborated system designed to achieve checks on their military, it might have been possible for either American or Soviet agencies to subvert its armed forces somehow and impose a compliant dictatorship, but vice versa I think a small country that was decolonized with similar prudent political measures could still have been overturned anyway. Maybe size is not the key; in Central America there is the example of Costa Rica, a country which has not, since the 1930s anyway, been subject to dictatorship, avoiding being steamrollered by the Yankee machine. To be sure I believe this has been largely the work of a leadership that recognized that Uncle Sammy was going to get its way one way or another and resolved to trim the political sails to minimize any perception of threat and to make Costa Rica available to US interests, such as bases for the Contras raised against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. But the nation has, perhaps at a high price, kept its effective independence and maintained civil liberties. (For one thing, it doesn't have an Army to pull a coup with, military forces having been much curtailed there).

But I do think given the challenges Indian nonalignment have posed to exasperate Western interests with over the scores of decades of Indian independence, a big part of Indian independence continuing meaningfully is its sheer size making a coup in foreign interests that much more difficult to carry out.
All what you said about India, applies just as well to Pakistan. And Pakistan certainly did have coups. As I say upthread, the unthinkable only needs to happen; once, then its no longer unthinkable. Big, diverse country.

India did not have coups due to a historical accident of being a one party state and having too many rebellions to put down. Coups always require political support. The opposition needs to give it political support (which happened with all of Pakistan's coups).
 
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