Vir Sanghvi

Published : 10 Oct 2010

I was watching British television news last week. A big story concerned the death of a Lieutenant Colonel in Afghanistan. Apparently, some British soldiers carry video cameras strapped to their headgear and so the shooting of the officer was recorded on videotape. It made for gruesome viewing.

The story was about the lack of facilities that led to his death. The Colonel commanded a small detachment of men who came under fire from the Taliban. When the attack began, they tried to radio for help but found that they could not get a signal in the covered space they were taking refuge in. So, the Colonel went out to try and get a signal. This made him an easy target for the Taliban who shot him. The bullet entered his shoulder and severed an artery.

His horrified troops then radioed the base and asked for a helicopter to pick up the Colonel and to take him to hospital. According to the TV channel, it took 40 minutes for the despatch of the helicopter to be approved once the message had reached. The helicopter took some time to reach the Colonel and overall, it was over an hour before he was placed in the helicopter to be taken to hospital. Though doctors did their best, he died three hours later.

It was a horrific story made more poignant by the demands for an enquiry from the Colonel’s mother. Why hadn’t the radios worked properly? Why had it taken so long to approve a helicopter?

The defence ministry was asked to respond by the TV channel. That response made the point that a) the radios were working fine, which cannot be right because no soldier would risk his life and expose himself to hostile fire trying to get a signal out in the open if he could simply use the radio from his secure, sheltered spot and b) even if the helicopter had reached earlier, the Colonel would still have died. The Taliban bullet had severed a key artery and death was inevitable.

That response was clearly unsatisfactory. At the time that the base delayed sending the helicopter nobody knew how serious the Colonel’s injuries were or whether his life could have been saved by rushing him to hospital. It was not as though some officer said, “Oh, he is going to die anyway,” and therefore decided to dilly-dally over sending a chopper.

That same day, Prime Minister David Cameron was asked to comment on the incident.

Cameron made all the right noises, but essentially his response was that British forces in Afghanistan did not have enough helicopters or helicopter pilots. However, the Colonel had died when Labour was in power. Now that the Conservatives had taken office, the British army had been given the choppers and pilots it needed.

It would seem to me that the army behaved scandalously. But that is not my concern this Sunday. What struck me while watching that report was how seriously the British took the death of a single officer in war time. Months after the event, it was the lead story on the news and the Prime Minister was being asked to explain the circumstances of the tragic death. Contrast the British example with the way in which we respond to the deaths of our soldiers — both army and para-military — even though we know that they have given their lives so that we can be safe and secure.

First of all, we would have no video-recording because nobody bothers to give our soldiers cameras. Secondly, no soldier would believe that he was entitled to get a chopper to come and pick him up from the battlefield once he had been shot. We simply don’t extend that sort of facility to our troops. Thirdly, the circumstances of the death would never be made public. The video-footage would never get out. We would never hear about how long it took for a rescue to be organised.

Fourthly, we in the media would never dare question the Prime Minister about the death of an individual soldier. We would act as though the PM was too important a man to bother with the death of a single officer. And finally, the reason why none of this would happen is because at some basic level, we simply do not care enough for the lives of our fighting men.

Consider the news items we come across every day. Soldiers are killed trying to do a job they have no business to attempt, imposing the law of the state in some insurgency-ridden part of India. Soldiers die in pointless clashes — during peace time! — on the border with Pakistan. Soldiers are ambushed by Naxalites and killed by the dozen.

Go through the newspapers for the last year and try and add up how many lives have been lost. Now, we are so brutalised by the constant litany of deaths that they no longer necessarily make page one. The killings are buried in some small item on some inside page. And yet, much of what we are as a nation is due to the sacrifices of our troops. It is easy for you and me to sit at home and criticise the way in which the CRPF is battling the Naxalites. But it is not so easy for the sons, daughters and widows of the hundreds of men who have died in this battle to bother with armchair criticism. Poorly-led, inadequately armed, insufficiently trained and bereft of accurate intelligence, our soldiers are sent off to their deaths. And when they fail to come back, only their families weep. The rest of us do not even notice.

The difference between India and a Western country is that we still have people willing to die for us. In the West, citizens are no longer willing to risk their lives in warfare. As long as battles are conducted with missiles and drones, the population is content to watch the spectacle on television. But once lives begin to be lost, the public turns against the war and demands an immediate pull-out.

Consider the US and Vietnam. Until the body count became high, Lyndon Johnson was a popular President. But as more and more soldiers began to die, he was vilified, the war lost public support and the US’s priority became to look for a way to get out. So it was with Tony Blair. History will remember him as one of Britain’s more successful prime ministers. But within his own country, he is treated as a villain or a ‘war criminal’ even, because he risked British lives in Iraq. And now, Barack Obama’s principal priority is to pull troops out of Afghanistan even though the consequence of a US withdrawal would be a certain return to the pre-2001 situation.

No Western nation could live with the casualties we suffer each week in the battle against the Maoists. By now, public resolve would have crumbled and there would be calls for some kind of deal to avoid further bloodshed. And no Western nation would have had the stomach for something like Kargil, where each hill was recaptured after close-proximity combat and many officers lost their lives.

The reason we know that we can fight challenges to our sovereignty and to the rule of law is because we are sure that we can count on our armed forces. Time after time we ask them to risk their lives for us. And they never ever let India down. So, spare a thought, this Sunday, for the Indian soldier. We never give him the facilities that are his due. And we never greet his death with the respect or concern it deserves. But all of us recognise that one reason why we are still a free and sovereign nation is because he is willing to die so that we can live.

Exclusive to TNSE.

Courtesy: Expressbuzz.com