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Lt Gen Dhiraj Seth will become the Indian Army’s 31st Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) and first officer from the Armoured Corps to rise to the top post in nearly three decades. He was commissioned into the 2nd Lancers regiment in December 1986. He is slated to assume charge on 30th June
Gen Shankar Roy Chowdhary (20th Lancer) was the last COAS who belonged to the Armoured Corps when he was Chief between 1994 and 1997. Gen Roy Chowdhary had ascended to the post when his predecessor Gen BC Joshi, who was also a ‘tank man’ (commissioned in the 64th Cavalry regiment), had suddenly died in harness.
The closest a Cavalry man came to the highest post before Lt Gen Dhiraj Seth’s appointment as the next Army Chief today, was in 2016. That year, Lt Gen Pravin Bakshi, the then Eastern Army Commander, was widely considered to be the front runner to succeed Gen Dalbir Suhag. The government, however, decided to appoint Gen Bipin Rawat as the Chief, superseding Lt Gen Bakshi, leading to a minor controversy at the time.
For the Armoured Corps, it is the end of a long wait to get one their own officers as the Army Chief, but in the first four decades since the post of the Chief of Army Staff was created in 1955, six Armoured Corps officers, including the first COAS, Gen Rajinder Singhji, were from the Armoured Corps. Between 1955 and 1997, besides Gen Rajinder Singhji, Gen JN Chowdhary (1962-66), Gen AS Vaidya (1983-86), Gen VN Sharma (1988-90), Gen BC Joshi (1993-94) and Gen Roy Chowdhary, from the Armoured Corps became COAS.
The artillery arm comes a close second with five gunners (as the artillery men are called) occupying the top post. They include Gen PP Kumarmangalam, Gen OP Malhotra, Gen SF Rodrigues, Gen S. Padmanabhan and Gen Deepak Kapoor. Engineers or Sapper Officers had to however wait until May 2022 to get their first COAS when Gen Manoj Pande was appointed to the top post to succeed Gen MM Naravane.
Infantry, the Indian Army’s largest arm, naturally has had the largest share of the top post with 17 of them helming the charge of the 1.1 million strong Army between 1955 to 2026. The Gorkha Rifles Regiment and the Sikh Light Infantry Regiment have the distinction of three Chiefs each from their ranks, followed by two each from Mahar and Dogra regiments.
There is an interesting aside here. The Hyderabad Regiment (which got incorporated into the Kumaon regiment after Operation Polo that annexed Hyderabad in 1948) had the honour of providing two successive Chiefs to the Indian Army between 1955 and 1961. Gen SM Srinagesh and Gen KS Thimayya both belonged to the Hyderabad Regiment. Later Gen TP Raina from the Kumaon Regiment also rose to the top post between 1975 and 1978. Incidentally, Gen Thimayya’s four-year tenure as Army Chief between 1957 and 1961 remains the longest ever tenure for a COAS after the post was created.
Nitin A. Gokhale
Author, thought leader and one of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Nitin A. Gokhale has forty years of rich and varied experience behind him as a conflict reporter, Editor, author and now a media entrepreneur who owns and curates two important digital platforms, BharatShakti.in and StratNewsGlobal.com focusing on national security, strategic affairs and foreign policy matters.
At the beginning of his long and distinguished career, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years, writing and analysing various insurgencies in the region, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 during the India-Pakistan war, and also brought live reports from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009.
Author of over a dozen books on wars, insurgencies and conflicts, Gokhale relocated to Delhi in 2006, was Security and Strategic Affairs Editor at NDTV, a leading Indian broadcaster for nine years, before launching in 2015 his own digital properties.
An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, South and South-East Asia to speak at various international seminars and conferences.
Gokhale also teaches at India’s Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the intelligence schools of both the R&AW and Intelligence Bureau.
He tweets at @nitingokhale
