Search the Internet           Tips

What He Died For

The oddest things sometimes lead to the most fulfilling experiences. So it was with a column I wrote here over a year ago, that suddenly took on a new life three months ago. How was I to know that this new life would send me on a five-hour journey through some gorgeous countryside in north India, rattling over atrocious roads at a fearful speed, to meet a couple who welcomed me to their home with affection that took my breath away?

Bear with me as I step you through what happened.

The column I'm Venal, You're Scum was written during the Kargil war last year, soon after reports came in about how Pakistan returned six Indian soldiers' bodies to us in a horribly mutilated condition. Naturally, the country witnessed an uproar over this atrocity. There was much outraged talk that Pakistan had violated the Geneva Convention by this act, much mention of the barbarism of that country, of how it was "capable of extreme cruelty."

It was in that climate that I wrote that article. "I cannot claim I can comprehend this torture", I wrote, and then asked:

What possesses people who do such things to other people? What purpose was served? What was achieved except revulsion and rage, except six families shattered?

But having said that, I also described several incidents of torture in India. These included the time police thrust needles into the eyes of prisoners at Bhagalpur in 1981, the brutal beating of a teenaged boy in a Bombay police station in 1993, and others, including two in which the police beat Indians to death.

Why did I write about these incidents? To show that mere hatred directed at Pakistan will not bring us peace our soldiers are fighting and dying for. To show that if their deaths are to mean anything, we must ask questions about the kind of India they are fighting to defend. And so I wrote:

I don't know why the Pakistanis tortured our six soldiers. It sickens me. I write this to ask -- in all humility and because I truly want to know -- why that crime was greeted by so much outrage, but tortured deaths like those [I described] found so little.

That article also had these lines:

I know there will be patriots leaping to denounce me for trivialising those six horrible deaths. Not at all. Instead, I am trying to de-trivialise, you might say, the deaths [I described], the stream of brutality that flows past us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. I want someone to tell me why it needs no comment.

In expecting those denunciations, I was certainly right. Over a hundred responses to that article flooded my box before I stopped counting. In them, my gentle readers called me "a low life rat", "an idiot", "extremely bigotted [sic] and biased and really confused", "a shallow manipulator", "a sick slave minded person", "myopic, biased and unpatriotic," "a holier-than-thou lout" and "a scumbag traitor." Others informed me that I was "letting the nation down", or wanted to know "why shoudn't [sic] you be tried with treason you antinational?" More than one dispensed advice in this vein: "If you don't like it here, go to Pakistan. Shame on you!"

(To be fair, I did get appreciative responses too, though the abuse drowned those out better than three to one).

I mention this to show the depths of feeling I had evidently touched, the gush of anger my views had uncapped. And evidently it is an anger that has stayed alive. For in July, a year after I wrote it, somebody dug up "I'm Venal, You're Scum" and posted it for public Web view with this comment: "We don't need the ISI when we have Dilip."

This brought me a fresh batch of abuse: I was a "pseudo-intellctual [sic]", a "white ant", "anally retentive" and had a "shitty outlook on life." Besides, I had in fact "condoned the brutal murder" of the six mutilated soldiers.

So far, so good. Or so bad. Much the same as last year. But this time, one alert reader thought there was no reason to stop at mere abuse. To a note he sent me that pronounced I was "the enemy within", he added this postscript: "I am mailing your peice [sic] de resistance to [the father of one of the six murdered soldiers] for his comments."

Days later, the father wrote to rediff.com, asking if he could reply to my article. He particularly wanted to do this, he said, because his "previous experiences" with journalists had not been particularly good. They "do not bother to acknowledge leave alone replying."

The day this letter came my way, I sat down and wrote to him. I explained that to me, his son was an authentic Indian hero, that I wished there were others like him around to inspire us. My article, I wrote, came out of a profound despair at the way some of our finest men, like your son, were dying in that war... It is deeply distressing to me how the rest of us wake up and worry about our soldiers' deaths only when a war breaks out. It is also deeply distressing to me that we bother about torture only when it happens to our soldiers during war. I want desperately to find a way to end this endless war in Kashmir, to bring peace there so we have men like your son alive to inspire us instead of being mourned in death...

To me, it seems clear that the way to that peace is to take an honest look at the kind of nation we are. To assess where we have done right and done wrong. I think I owe that much to the memory of your son. For I think that if there is a lesson in his tragic death, it is in the effort to strive for the better India that I believe men like him stood for, in the effort to strive for the peace that I believe your son fought for.

The warmth in this father's reply astonished me. What's more, he invited me to his home. "It would be our personal honour" if I visited, he said. As I sat there looking at his letter, I couldn't help thinking that one gentle reader had accused me of "condoning the brutal murder" of this very man's son. Yet here he was, inviting me home. This father knew I had not "condoned" his son's murder. This father understood the spirit in which I had written my article. How much that mattered to me, I knew from the lump that formed in my throat as I sat.

And that's how I found myself in a rattling Maruti, speeding towards the home of a brave young Indian who died fighting Pakistan. When I got there, his parents, this so brutally bereaved couple, welcomed me almost as if I was a son. I spent the afternoon there, talking with them about their son over lunch. Their profound sense of loss, their disillusionment with unresponsive politicians of every stripe, their simple gratitude for the outpouring of sentiment from ordinary Indians everywhere, and the way they treated me -- these moved me to an extent I was unprepared for. It was a humbling, touching experience; as I said, easily the most fulfilling few hours I have spent in many months.

In a future column, I'll have more about what we discussed that day. But we returned to one thought over and over again. "What did my son die for?" the mother asked me. "We allowed a gang of thieves to enter our country so easily. Then we lost the lives of 550 young Indians in throwing them off our own land. And we call this a victory? What kind of victory is this?"

"What did my son die for?"

I had no answer. For these are just the questions I have asked myself countless times since that Kargil war began.

Yet I thought that day: if there is ever to be some purpose in this senseless death, something good that comes from it, it will come from these very questions his own mother is asking today. Because her questions may spur many more of us to ask our own questions in turn. Maybe then we will stop swallowing blindly the glib words leaders and writers in both countries produce to keep hostility alive. Maybe then we will ask why some of our finest young men die daily on our borders instead of living their lives among us.

Maybe then we will ask for peace, not endless war. Value each Indian life, not have to mourn soldiers' deaths.

Dilip D'Souza