Reforms Without Legislation?: Securing India’s Defence Transformation Beyond Executive Action

India’s designation of 2025 as the ‘Year of Reforms’ reflects that its defence transformation has entered another critical phase. The reforms, however, did not begin in 2025, nor did they originate solely with the executive. The post-Kargil reform period has witnessed a continuous foundational process of institutional review involving the Kargil Review Committee (KRC), the Group of Ministers (GoM), subsequent expert committees, parliamentary deliberations and executive implementation. The KRC report was tabled in the Parliament in February 2000, while the GoM process examined and produced sets of recommendations on ‘internal security, border management, intelligence apparatus, and management of defence’. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) in May 2012 reported that Chapter VI of the GoM report ‘contains 75 recommendations, of which 63 recommendations have been implemented’. The Naresh Chandra Task Force in 2012 and the Shekatkar Committee5 in 2016 subsequently revisited important aspects of these reform trajectory.