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Darkness on The Edge of War

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.

Dilip D'Souza