Chronicle of a death foretold
By Garga Chatterjee
School textbooks are interesting things and the vision of the world they impart upon you can involve years of unlearning – in most instances, complete delearning is not possible at all. It is from such school textbooks we get our ideas of history – at least that is wherefrom I got mine. In that framing of the past via history, kings and their stories of building and losing kingdoms have centrestage. Avenging one’s sisters slighting, avenging killing of a father, avenging one’s own usurpation from the throne and similar personal grievances of the royals were often presented as prominent reasons for war between kings. Of course, these could not have been the only reasons, but these were presented as ‘sparks’ or ‘factors’ in the mix. The thought that often occurred to me in my childhood when I sat in the class was about the people who constituted the armies that fought these bloody battles. I can understand ties of caste, clan, religion and such – but for kingdoms and their armies that encompassed more than one such category (and most did), what was in it for most of the men fighting battles on behalf of their kings? Why would they march and fight because some big guy had been miffed by the actions of some other big guy? They held no personal grudge either way. It is not as if their king loved them any more beyond the service that they provided. In short, there was no love lost. The part-time soldiers knew that they were mercenaries. That made them professionals. The ‘give’ and the ‘take’ were well defined – the professionals knew what mattered most was their own life. That is precisely why certain things were quite common. Mutinies were common. Desertion was commoner. Defeat of a king often did not result from some great reversal in actual battle, by say being ‘out-killed’ by numbers – but simply because most of the army (that is to say, most of the mercenaries) making a quick cost-benefit ratio calculation between sticking with their employer and fleeing. The subcontinent has produced countless such mercenaries. We now like to think of many of them as ‘veers’ and ‘ghazis’. The ’cause’ of fighting was, more often than not, as irrelevant to the armed man as the ‘prestige’ of a five-star hotel is to an underpaid bathroom-cleaner. With the rise with nation-states and ideologies of nationalism, we now have an unprecedented phenomenon that has been sweeping the world, particularly for the last couple of centuries. I am referring to permanent standing armies and agencies for dealing with ‘external threats’ to nation-states. There are hordes upon hordes of young people signed up in the army and other agencies, doing exactly what mercenaries of various hues have done in the past, with a crucial difference. Many of them vaguely think they have a cause (‘the nation’, its ‘security’ and ‘prestige’) which is better than the ’cause’ of his opposing party and that they do what they do not only for money and other material benefits. In short, they do not think of themselves as mercenaries. So much so that now the term ‘mercenary’ has become a nasty word. Now it is generally associated, quite tellingly, with ‘weak’ states or ‘non-state’ actors – in short, entities that do not have a strong ‘nation-state’ ideology. All of what I have been talking about is about the employees – patriots or mercenaries. However, what about the employers? I am sure that a nice bathroom looks nice to the bathroom cleaner, the hotel manager and the owner. But who among these benefits more from a bathroom cleaner saying ‘I love my job’, that is it not merely a matter of cleaning a bathroom but the ‘prestige’ of the hotel? All such loves hinge on an assumption on the part of the employee – that there is something greater that the employer and the employee are both a part of, where the vertical employer/employee dichotomy vanishes and they stand side by side, as equals. This something is the nation and is held together by nationalism – the king of ‘glues’. Sarabjit Singh and Surjeet Singh were neck deep in the glue. The former is dead. ‘Tactical kindness’ from the state of Pakistan has saved the latter. The state of India denies their claims of working for it – certifying them instead as free-actors. The state of Pakistan ascribes free agency to its nationals who get caught or killed across the LOC and deny any connection. The mythical glue produced by the anthem, jhanda and the danda seems to lose potency during these times. Who endangered Sarabjit Singh’s life the most? Do we have anything to fear from those who imperiled Sarabjit’s life the most (and I mean the other Sarabjits in jails and under cover on both sides of the Radcliffe line)? To ask the question somewhat differently, who is most responsible for the plight of the Pakistani nationals in jails of India? What is common between their plight and the plight of Sarabjit? What common between their tormenters? What is out attitude towards the tormenters? It sadly is one of salute. (IPA Service)