Sukumaran C. V.
Two Indian soldiers were killed and their bodies were mutilated by the Pakistani army over the LoC. The Army Chief said, as an army chief ought to say, that ‘we will retaliate if provoked further’. The issue may flare up into a war and if a war ensues, every Indian will think that we are teaching Pakistan a lesson and every Pakistani will think that they are teaching India a lesson.
While we have plenty of internal enemies to
wage war against, is it proper to wage war against an external ‘enemy’? And if
every nation successfully wages war against the enemy within, will they have
external enemies to fight with? Certainly NOT. In our times, a war against
other nations won’t make any country a better one. War of weapons is basically
an uncivilized and savage business. Instead of waging war against other
nations, every nation has to purge itself of the anti-people, anti-social
elements and interests within it.We have seen nude Manipuri women protesters with a banner which read “Indian Army Rape Us”. We have seen the tortured, raped and mutilated dead body of 32 year old Thangjam Manorama who was arrested by the personnel of Assam Rifles which wields enormous power in the North East under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. If the beheading of an Indian soldier by Pakistan is gruesome (of course it is), with what adjective can we describe the Indian Army’s act of rape, torture and murder of the 32 year-old woman?
Is it Pakistan which poses a greater threat to our mothers, sisters and daughters in the North East and Kashmir? Is it Pakistan which poses a greater threat to the women and girls in our cities and all public space? Is it Pakistan which deprives our tribal people of their right to live and cultivate on their own lands?
In 1992, the Orissa government allowed the corporate giants Utkal Alumina to mine the bauxite under the Baphlimali hills of the tribal district Rayaguda. 3,000 acres of agricultural land of the tribals was arbitrarily leased to the Utkal Alumina and the protesting tribals were dealt with bullets. Three tribals were killed. All over the central India, this same story continues—the ‘Democratic’ Indian Republic killing the poorest of its citizens and depriving them of their forests and lands for the corporate enterprise! Is it not more than gruesome?
Who is our greater enemy? Is it Pakistan? Pakistan is a country reeling under the blasphemy laws, a country which is pulled back to medieval ages by the obscurantist forces. Let it fight against the fanatic elements which pull the country backward. Let it fight and overpower its greatest enemy—religious jingoism and the jihadi mindset. India is not Pakistan’s enemy number one and Pakistan is not India’s too. Both the countries have their lethal enemies lurking within the borders—the anti-people policies and interests.
Our environment is devastated by the greed of a few, almost all our rivers are polluted by our industries; we use more money to purchase destructive weapons than to build schools and to teach children or to quench the hunger of the starving millions. We write off corporate income tax worth crores of rupees and slash subsidies to the poor and the farmers. We induce thousands of farmers to suicide each year and allow a few corporates to thrive and our PM says that ‘we must do all that we can to revive the animal spirits of our businesses’. What about the broken spirits of the females, the poor, the Environment and the farmers? At first let’s worry about their well-being. To worry about reviving the animal spirits of the businesses at the cost of the poor and the farmers is suicidal for a country like ours.
Kwaja Ahmad Abbas describes (in his autobiography I Am Not An Island: An Experiment in Autobiography) a bizarre killing he has seen in the 1945 Mumbai, which ‘was gripped by a series of communal riots’. From the balcony of his friend Sathe’s office in front of the Harkissandas Hospital, Abbas saw a goonda spying ‘a man in kurta and pajama walking by the side of the road’. The goonda ‘followed him, and taking him to be a Muslim, stabbed him’ to death. While wiping ‘the blood on the knife on the clothes of the victim, a doubt seemed to cross his mind. So he tugged the pajama cord, opened it, saw that the man was not circumcised, and then clasping his knife, he uttered two words that would haunt’ Abbas ‘for years’.
The words the goonda uttered were Mishtake ho gaya.
Even if the man was a circumcised one, the act of the goonda could only be considered as a mistake. That was in pre-independent India. In the independent India also, we keep committing this mistake in the name of religion. We committed it in the 1993 Mumbai, in the 2002 Gujarat and we are not sure that we won’t commit the mistake again.
We celebrated one more Republic Day with an unwanted display of our military might and we will celebrate more of them in this fashion. (To whom is the State displaying its might? To its own citizens, the dispossessed millions?). But only when we stop committing gruesome mistakes in the name of caste, class, gender, religion and the State, we will be a real republic—the people’s Republic of India, the real Secular Democratic Republic.
