The Distraction of War

The Powers of Distraction

Twenty  Indian soldiers lost their lives defending their country, and allegedly on the other side, 45 soldiers died. The cold and the terror that it brought to our hearts is indescribable. Many years ago, perhaps 20 and more, one of my M.A students in JNU, told me he was from Arunachal Pradesh, and his house had a boundary line running through it. They had their meals in India, and their heads rested at bed time in China.  I can still remember his face, a tall, lean man, with a ready laugh, entreating us to enter his world, in class room conversations, with its complex contradictions of daily existence.

In 2015 September, when we travelled with a bunch of  Jammu University and JNU students through Kargil, by bus to Leh, we stopped to have tea, and I bought a fleece lined pair of leather gloves in that small town set among trees and boulders. It didn’t look like a war zone, and the weather was lovely. We went to the Museum, where we met soldiers and sentries, who told us about the Kargil war. I picked up a stone from the site, and  to my horror, it was  still sticky with blood. Pakistani infiltrators had climbed down the mountain, and were in locked arm to arm combat with Indian soldiers. Grave sites marked the death of  our warriors.

War is a great distraction for rulers with local problems. When something cannot be controlled, they start the drumbeats of war. Patriotism is whipped up, each combat is a sign of the threat of more deaths. China is famous for hiding its problems, and coming up with something so extravagant that the concurrent problem seems insignificant. War would be the final solution, it will destroy the lands which they hold on to so tenaciously since the 1962 war. It would settle the issues which separate it from India,  for they feel that one more step into India will reinforce their mastery over terrains they covet. No wonder, 60 percent of the army has been stationed in Ladakh for a long time, and the Ladakhis fear Chinese intrusion into their villages. Visiting Pangong Lake with a team, we were told that the Chinese continually walk over the frozen lake in winter, and in summer they come in boats, and raid the homes and  gardens of the local community. Jammu University and JNU Phd scholars under the supervision of Prof Tiplut Nongbri and Dr Suresh Kumar have described this problem severally.

When China had its Olympic Games, the whole world was glued to the television watching their gymnasts. Simultaneously, they had floods which displaced millions from their homes. It was not as if we knew how they felt during that time, how they coped with a natural disaster of that magnitude. Covid 19 resurrects itself in Wuhan, people are anxious for there is no end to the cycle of repetitive infections, and so their Government decides to launch an attack on the road which connects Indian troops to the last outpost on the Border between India and China. This is the time when all the energies of the  Indian people are being spent on avoiding the hunger of its migrant workers, when the lockdowns are being lifted so that the phase of herd immunity may develop at the risk of individual lives, when the hospitals have become unidirectional turning away sick people who do not have Covid 19,  and the intelligentsia thwarted on one ground or another for being “unpatriotic” for critiquing the right wing politicians for their death dealing segregations of minorities versus majorities in a constitutional democracy. 

The distraction of war is met with some alertness, and the threat postponed.   War with China, who is presently allied with Pakistan is not something anybody wants, as missiles will fly this way and that, and nuclear destruction is a calamity no one wants to deal with. The Achilles heel is ofcourse bad temper. No one has a solution for that, and it’s the accelerator on a nuclear war, and we know it can come from anywhere.

For the present regime of rulers,  globally, the move to the space age means being ready for the revolution (war)  which brings them to the edge. Like Macbeth’s self fulfilling prophecy, the witches claim to his success lies in his believing in a future where death must prevail. So instead of looking to feed the masses, both Chinese and Indian governments, as well as Pakistan, continue to feed the war machinery of mutual annihilation, instead of supporting the will to survive on planet earth, which most normal humans want. Like tourists who go to erupting volcano sites, and die sudden and terrible deaths, we too, will be facing our extinction if we allow them to realize their extravagant nuclear budgets as real practice.