To the Indian army officer, it has always been an essential perk of the job to have a batman — a personal assistant responsible for duties such as shining your boots, cleaning your weapons and serving your whisky at sundown.

To many Indian politicians, however, the post is an abhorrent relic of the British Raj, under which soldiers have to perform degrading tasks such as walking their officers’ dogs and taking their children to school.

Now the Indian Government has finally bowed to political pressure and ordered the army, for the first time, to prevent its roughly 34,000 officers from using their sahayaks, or assistants, as domestic servants.

“Sahayaks will not be employed for menial household work,” A. K. Antony, the Defence Minister, told Parliament on Monday. “Any practice that lowers the self-esteem is to be abhorred . . . In this context, it is always ensured and shall continue to be ensured that soldiers are not employed on any demeaning and humiliating tasks.”

Mr Antony was responding to a report by a parliamentary committee last year which said that using batmen as domestic servants was “demeaning and humiliating” and contributed to psychological problems in the 1.3 million-strong army.

“The committee take a very serious view of the shameful practice which should have no place in an independent India,” the report said.

A separate government commission also recommended cracking down on the use of batmen as servants among paramilitary forces under the Home Ministry.

Many MPs want to abolish the system, under which batmen are still officially obliged to answer their officers’ telephones, maintain their uniforms and weapons and act as their bodyguards. India is thought to be the only country in the world to maintain such a tradition after Pakistan’s decision to replace batmen with contracted non-combatant domestic staff in 2004.

Britain abolished the system after the Second World War. In India, the navy and air force phased it out several years ago and pressure has been mounting on the army to follow suit. Current and former batmen complain that they are issued with inferior uniforms, passed over for promotions and frequently humiliated by their officers, or more often their wives.

Army psychologists have also found that verbal abuse and perceived humiliation are among the factors accounting for a spate of recent suicides in the army.

Yet Mr Antony stopped short of abolishing the system altogether, in an apparent concession to army top brass worried that losing such perks could accelerate a brain drain to the private sector.

Instead, he defended the army by saying that it had repeatedly issued detailed instructions on duties to be performed by batmen.

He also backed the army’s assertion that a batman was a “comrade-in-arms” to officers, symbolising “trust, respect, warmth, confidence and interdependence, which are the fundamentals of relations between the leaders and the led”.

The army deployed similar arguments before the parliamentary committee, testifying that though batmen were not supposed to act as domestic servants, many did so out of “reverence”.

Some officers have also argued that civilian government officials enjoy similar perks — and often treat their staff far worse.

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