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Notice how we’re becoming more than usual fauji -loving lately? No, I don’t mean that popular television serial in the 1990s that gave Shah Rukh Khan a post odd-even rule road to our heart.
I refer instead to our public endorsements of armed forces. The sporadic sharing on social media of our martyrs’ stories. A Lance Naik Hanumanthappa here, an emotional letter forwarded there, a comparison with ex-JNU Jat Captain Pavan Kumar drawn in between. I refer also to television debates on our democracy and its oddities, debates where the favourite argument tends to be a reference to our dying soldiers. A photoshopped image of soldiers with the tricolour, a minister’s timely call-in during a show.
Beyond that, our knowledge of their kind, and memories of their contribution are hazy.
Feel-good notions as they are, there is something about these invocations that makes me uncomfortable. They seem too convenient. And oftentimes ill placed, if not ill-intentioned. Something along the lines of: ‘You terrible young people shouting slogans, while our soldiers are dying’. ‘How dare you say you fear for our plurality, while our soldiers are dying’. ‘You dissenting idiots, while our soldiers are dying’.
I simplify, but hope you get the point. What can one say when the soldiers are brought in!
And that, of course, was the reason they were introduced into the debate in the first place.
Great though their sacrifice is, is it fair in a society to focus obsessively on a single profession? Does each profession not have its place? Does each person not play his or her part in building our society? Is the contribution of the teacher who inspires a generation less laudable? Or the unknown social worker in rural India espousing the benefits of contraception? The scientist developing the Indian space programme? Even a successful businessman who creates jobs for thousands? Where would we be if millions of such people didn’t play their part?
It was often quoted in the television debates that if not for our soldiers, we wouldn’t have any liberty to debate about. True. As true as the fact that liberty without a functioning, growing society would not last long.
Aakar Patel, the executive director of Amnesty International India, quotes a 2014 study by Praxis India that shows that every year 100 sewage workers (of a workforce of 5,000) die in Delhi after entering manholes and drains. He points out that if this ratio were to be applied to the Armed Forces, it would amount to 40,000 dead soldiers!
Yet again and again we invoke our soldiers alone, in our outrage. Sometimes, in a burst of patriotic fervour, sometimes for conveniently closing a debate.
My brother, uncle, father-in-law and many other people in the extended family belong to the armed forces. Brave men, all. My brother, a paratrooper, had always wanted to be in the army, even as a child. Like many of his ilk, he flirted with death more than once, in both the North East and in Kashmir. Once, in fact, in Siachen, in an incident similar to Lance Naik Hanumathappa.
As a young Captain out on a recce, that day he fell into a crevasse. His face was almost submerged in the icy water at the bottom, while his body was broken in many places by the jutting ice on his way down there. Nature added insult to injury by shifting a boulder of ice to pin down one side of his body. The space at the bottom allowed only two people at a time for rescue attempts, which wasn’t enough to push the boulder off him. Almost an hour later no progress had been made. Instead, they could no longer detect a pulse.
The Captain conducting the rescue had no option but to announce a last attempt. Should this fail, they'd have no option but to leave my brother there. One last time they heaved, they shoved, and the boulder moved — just enough for them to pull my brother out from under it. But he still had no pulse and his mouth was shut with frozen ice. The Captain used an ice-axe to free his mouth but they couldn’t revive him and he was sent by helicopter to the army hospital. Incredibly, my brother survived, albeit with a body broken in many parts. Soon he was back at work, including para-jumping.
Sometime after this incident, he was home for a wedding. This was a time of very strained relations between India and Pakistan. The whole country was united in heightened patriotism. I was no different.
‘Is it appropriate for us to celebrate a wedding?’ I asked him.
‘Everything has its place,’ was his reply.
When I see politicians and anchors on television invoke our soldiers as rebuttal points in a debate, when I see many of our outraged posts on Facebook, I remember that conversation. And I think of our soldiers still sitting in protest for their benefits under OROP. I wonder whether they have quality gear for the glacier. And I consider the fact that despite all our outrage, our motivation to serve the Nation is falling.
Not many of us are sending our children to the border. The Indian army is, sadly, facing a huge and growing deficit of officers.
The armed forces are crying out to our country’s best and brightest but I wonder whether, in all this outraged noise, any of us are listening, other than to use them as counter-points in debates.
