Rediff on the Net / July 1999
Darkness on The Edge of War
Dilip D'Souza
A cough was what it took, one wet night near Bargi in Madhya Pradesh, to
let me know I was bang in the middle of a village. Nearly treading on
the cougher's toes. I had not known. You see, even though this village
is spitting distance from the gigantic Bargi dam on the Narmada that
supplies electricity bright and visible to the nearby town of Bargi
Nagar, this village remains without electricity. Remains dark like under
a blanket. So dark that while trudging through, I could not see twelve
inches in any direction. I had no idea this man was right next to me.
That his house was a few feet away. Thus the revelatory character of his
cough.
That dark.
A recent Outlook magazine article features another village. This is
Johragaon, near Aligarh. It is home to the family of Yogendra Singh of
the Rajputana Rifles, killed in action in our ongoing Kargil war. The
Outlook correspondent accompanied his body to his village. The last 20
km to the village is along a kutcha, an unfinished, road. Johragaon also
has no electricity. "Through the pitch black," writes Outlook's
correspondent, "we hear an eerie howling. The primal sound of community
mourning."
That eerie; that pitch black. That dark, too.
Here's the situation I'm trying to wrap my fingers around. In 1999,
India has large dams that supply their electricity to people like me who
sit at our desks and work, hundreds and thousands of miles away. But
also in 1999, there are tiny villages next door to some of those dams,
villages whose residents can actually see the magic that electricity
wreaks, only minutes away. But they cannot share in it. We do not care
to supply them the stuff. This is how we have developed our nation,
brought it to the brink of the 21st century.
In 1999, we also have a war raging with Pakistan, just the latest in a
long series of battles we have fought with them for half a century. We
applaud the sacrifice of the men who die for us on the frontlines. We
race to contribute money for their devastated families. But we hear no
jarring note as their bodies come home from the war along roads of mud,
to villages without electricity, dark as they have always been. This,
too, is how we have developed our nation. To the point where even though
a country cannot be bothered to lay roads or electrify their homes, it
expects its soldiers to die for it.
We build huge dams, but we route their benefits firmly away from Indians
too poor and silent to matter. In life, that's how contemptuous we are
of them. But let them just enrol in the army -- it is a good job, after
all, and those are hard to find -- let them just do that, let them just
wait for a war, let them just die in it. In death, we will sing the
glory of their sacrifice, turn them into heroes for a few minutes, then
forget them.
There's something bitter and obscene about all this. That's what this
war is really about, isn't it? The elites of two horribly poor countries
send some of their poorest to their deaths because the elites cannot be
bothered to look at, let alone do something about, the way those poor
live. And we tell them they are dying for the glory of the country: the
very country that has no time for them unless they die in our war. We
should be ashamed.
Yes, that's just what this war is really about. Just one more way we
have found to tell several hundred million Indians that they must keep
waiting for their concerns to be addressed; that the country has higher
priorities than their aspirations to a dignified life; that they must be
willing to "sacrifice in the national interest." The same meaningless
phrases we have been offering them for 52 years.
And of course, it is never the right time for their concerns. We never
get around to their priorities. It is always them, and never us, who
"sacrifice in the national interest." Sometimes their homes and land to
development that leaves them behind, other times their lives in a war.
What's the difference, really? Whose interest, really?
I don't know how long this war will last. When it's over, I hope we will
pay attention to two things. It's not much of a hope, but I'll list them
here anyway.
First, Kashmir and its people. Tempers are high, positions are rigid,
much empty-headed rhetoric has been flung about; but there is one very
simple truth about Kashmir. It is the single greatest obstacle to peace
between India and Pakistan. Anyone who says otherwise has his head
buried in the Line of Control. What's more, and worse, India and
Pakistan have spent these 52 years caring two hoots about the people of
Kashmir. "Kashmir will remain part of India," someone once yelled in my
ear, "regardless of what its people want." This is a solution? This is
foolishness that is calculated to lose Kashmir to India, no more and no
less. How about negotiating real peace, real answers, in Kashmir? That
will take into account what all its people -- Kashmiri Hindus driven
from their homes as well as other Kashmiris on both sides of the LoC --
want. That will mean serious compromise, not holding stubbornly to
positions that only slaughter more Indians, even if we glorify their
deaths. Let's find the wisdom, maturity and statesmanship to make such
compromise, however hard the path, so we can also find peace.
Second, our own shameful inequities. Fine, the war-buffs have got their
war, tended to that highest priority they tell us the country faces.
Fine. Please may we now get to everything else we have neglected? Can we
start by at least recognising the miserable lives millions of Indians
are condemned to live? The great shame in having more desperately poor
Indians today than Indians who found freedom in 1947? I hear so often
that we will not rest until the last intruder is flung out of Kargil. I
long to hear that we will not rest until the last Indian is literate.
There is glory in dying for the country, they say. But there is greater
glory, surely, in living for the country, in living in dignity and hope.
Let's make that mean something. Let's find glory not in death, but in
life.
The two may seem like utterly disparate goals. They are also profoundly
linked. It took a conversation with a tribal man in Satara district
recently to remind me just how linked. He said: I don't want to lose
Kashmir. I want it to remain part of India. But both our countries have
taken such rigid positions that we will keep on fighting wars. We will
never solve the problem. As long as we don't solve it, people like me
will remain poor and there will be all this caste and religious trouble
in the country.
How astonishingly perceptive, I thought. Yet how easily we brand people
like you ignorant criminals. Unless you die in the war.
"From your articles," I get scolded often, "it's clear that you hate
everything about India." Not at all. Instead, I weep. I weep for all we
might be, could be. I weep for the India those who went before must have
dreamed of in the euphoria of 1947. The India that is today trapped in a
mire of wars and bombs and hatreds and misery and phony patriots hiding
behind security men. I cry, as Alan Paton did elsewhere with such tragic
eloquence, for the beloved country.
This beloved country.
Go to: Citizens Against Indo-Pak War in Kargil, Kashmir