A year or so ago, I was in Hussainiwala, in Punjab’s Ferozepur district, on the India-Pakistan border where the Sutlej flows. Until the 1970s, there used to be a flourishing trade in dried fruits and nuts across the border here. All that’s over now. What we have instead is a Retreat Ceremony along the lines of Wagah. The evening I was there people crowded into the stands on both sides, waving flags and singing songs. The soldiers did their little dramatic routine, playing to the galleries with grimaces, boot-stomping and hoisted rifles. They were cheered raucously, the more aggressive the posturing, the louder the applause. Except perhaps for two or three people, everybody else was thrilled with all this display of ‘patriotic’ belligerence.
A duality
For the armed forces, the performance is just another day at work. Backstage, soldiers from both sides rehearse together, exchange snacks and movie CDs, and peaceably send back goatherds who stray across the border. The amity as well as the swagger at sundown are real, and if war breaks out tomorrow, the killing will be as real. It’s a duality they live with. But for a gullible audience that does not have the benefit of nuance, viewing a faux skirmish such as this is to imagine an always hostile enemy. It actively stokes bloodthirstiness.
On a larger scale, on mass and social media platforms, just such a stoking is going on — a crude and constant invoking of a bogeyman, a rage always kept at boiling point.
Soldiers, who had so far stayed away from political grandstanding, have today been hauled into television studios and Twitter timelines and forced into the same false binary as everyone else — with us or against us, nationalist or anti-national, patriot or traitor. Forcing them to play to the gallery is doing the security forces a huge disservice, and this government has dragged them into the very public and simplistic ‘us versus them’ debate just as cynically as governments down the years have dragged them into conflicts planted and watered by politicians.
Unfortunately, in the Kashmir Valley today, as elsewhere, it is precisely an easy, populist binary that is not available to the armed forces. Who are ‘us’ and who are ‘them’? Citizen, terrorist, insurgent, provocateur, informer — they are all mixed up in one bag.
That eventful day, Major Leetul Gogoi broke ethical rules of engagement but, equally, he was an ordinary young man functioning in extraordinary circumstances. It is surprising the Army should have reacted by honouring him rather than acknowledging it as an aberration, but one wonders how much such reactions are forced by a climate where military-political lines are being calculatedly blurred, and by the shrillness of debate that insists on black and white answers to murky grey questions.
Sophisticated cynicism regardless, for an overwhelming majority, the abstraction of ‘nation’ will always be represented by the easy symbolism of soil, flag and anthem. These sentiments drive the soldier too. Quoting Tolstoy calling patriotism “stupid and immoral” might be intellectually correct, but it is facile and ignores the soldier.
This person has undergone years of intense training, a reconditioning of a person into an automaton to succeed in war. Ideals of flag and country have been drilled in so deep that he is willing to lay down his life unquestioningly for these. How do you invoke a borderless world or the idea of ‘nation as sham’ for this person?
Every argument that intellectualises the idea of nationhood without contextualising it enough drives the wedge deeper into the false binary. Worse, it plays into the hands of the jingoistic, desk-bound patriot-politicians who have conveniently made the armed forces the face of the dispute. And it’s a role the forces are increasingly and naively accepting because it seems like ‘recognition’ after decades of bureaucratic neglect and mistreatment.
Faced with cinematic posturing on one side that claims to ‘respect’ the soldier and by a dissociated condescension on the other, no prizes for guessing where the soldier imagines salvation lies.
The discussion around the Kashmir Valley has now become so much about theories of nationalism, about grandstanding on one or the other side, that the conflict itself has been normalised. By either constantly foregrounding the soldier’s martyrdom or by casually demonising the soldier, we are conveniently forgetting to ask why the soldier is there in the first place.
Surely it would be wise now for the generals to remember that finding solutions in the Kashmir Valley is not the Army’s job, but the government’s.
vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in
