It’s a cliché that war is hell. A Punjabi friend mentions an older relative who was deployed on the western front in 1965. After the war, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) kept him awake at night for the rest of his life.
Listening to fellow Indians, it’s clear they aren’t aware of the horrors of war. In Assam, some of my in-laws were whooping for more of Operation Sindoor. A lady snorted that Rahul Gandhi could never have taken such a decisive step. A gentleman was outraged by the “premature” ceasefire.
Even the DMK in Tamil Nadu, ordinarily against any non-Dravidian imposition, led a parade in support of Sindoor, earning unprecedented praise from the Governor (who otherwise must have sulked at missing the action). The DMK has supported the nation’s war efforts since 1962.
India is delirious with jingoism. “Let’s nuke them and get it over with,” a Bengali friend in the Philippines said, “How else will you permanently end terrorism?” I reminded him that the US bombed Afghanistan for decades, only to let the Taliban return to power.
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Less feverish are those directly affected, like the Kashmiris. Between the April 22 terrorist attack and the May 6 counterstrike, several Kashmiris were keen that India and Pakistan duke it out once and for all. When the explosions began, however, they reconsidered. This, in a nutshell, is the difference between living through a war and onanistic jingoism.
Indians (and Pakistanis) seem to suffer a deficiency of emotional quotient (EQ). This afflicts not just the media, which imagined sinking Karachi, but also the public that imagines war to be a neat and manageable affair, like an IPL match or dancing circus horses.
A low EQ explains why Pakistanis celebrated a win, after the ceasefire. Perhaps they did diplomatically; not militarily. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated, it was Pakistan’s Director General Military Operations (DGMO) who called India’s DGMO on May 10 for a ceasefire. There may have been backchannel talks, as the US insists, but the record will credit it to the DGMO call.
Low EQ prevents Indians from seeing Sindoor’s diplomatic disaster. After 26/11, PM Manmohan Singh isolated Pakistan as a “rogue” state and no longer were our two countries “hyphenated”. During Sindoor, not one country stood with India—perhaps irked over the past decade by an arrogant Vishwaguru—and we are now again “hyphenated”, Bollywood-twins’ style.
Our lowest EQ Indians decided to “shoot the messenger”, i.e., Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, who announced the ceasefire. Trolls viciously attacked his wife and daughter. It was nauseating and unforgivable. But what did you expect? The trolls’ leadership politically thrives on stirring the pot, sacrificing anyone needed to keep the emotional flames high. Misri’s boss, S. Jaishankar, was conspicuously silent, though he never misses a chance to hector the West. He obviously never wants to lose his job.
One reason for this low EQ is a low intelligence quotient (IQ) among Indians and Pakistanis. Consider that the highest IQ person in the world in centuries, Albert Einstein, said: “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” That we take the opposite view proves where we stand, IQ-wise.
To combat this deficiency, or even to be anti-fascist, there ought to be a sizeable anti-war culture in India. There is not; this contrasts my own experience growing up.
In high school, my 12th-grade English teacher was the popular Frank McCourt, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Angela’s Ashes. But to me, the more memorable was 11th-grade English teacher Connie Collier, whose reading list has stuck with me since.
It included Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about Billy Pilgrim, a Second World War survivor of the Dresden (Germany) fire-bombing, which was only overshadowed by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1938), about Joe Bonham, a soldier who wakes up and finds himself without limbs, sight, hearing, a mouth or even a face. Only his mind works, trapped in a useless body.
Billy Pilgrim lives “unstuck in time”. It is the only way to live with the war horrors he’s experienced. He says: “The nicest veterans…the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”
Anti-war literature
Joe Bonham gets right to the point: “did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god i’m glad i’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? did they say i’m glad i died to make the world safe for democracy? did they say i like death better than losing liberty? did any of them ever say it’s good to think i got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? did any of them ever say look at me i’m dead but i died for decency and that’s better than being alive? did any of them ever say here i am i’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land?” (sic)
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At that time, much Vietnam War fiction was also published. One of the writers of the then released Apocalypse Now (1979) was Michael Herr, whose Dispatches (1977) was a searing anti-war book; Philip Caputo’s A Rumour of War blew my mind; as did Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers, adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick.
I searched for anti-war Indian fiction. There is none, save a background reference in Anuja Chauhan’s Baaz, and some Punjabi literature that I have little access to. (India’s English fiction is anyway impoverished.) The class/caste stratification in the military is also a factor: jawans, the proverbial cannon fodder from an agrarian background, are uninterested in sharing their experience in the culture.
No wonder our middle-class, stuffed with the fast food of unvarying OTT and jingoistic movies, is hungry for more war; it lacks a capacity for empathy. That is worrying, for empathy is what sets us humans apart from the rest.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.
Source:https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/india-pakistan-war-jingoism-lack-of-anti-war-culture/article69574855.ece