George Menezes

WHAT more can I do? Except to pray that that the loved ones of the ‘brave ones’ find a special courage to go on living, just as the dead found the courage to die for a beautiful nation and an endless, messed-up cause?
For a few years after I left the Indian Air Force my visiting card read ‘Ex-Squadron Leader’. In later years, it was dropped.
Today, somehow I feel the need to put my Air Force rank back on my card, if only to identify with the great guys in the three Armed Forces, whom I once knew and loved and whose historic deeds of gallantry will live beyond the pathetic posturing of leaders into whose blood-stained hands we have handed over the governance of this politically gang-raped land.
Both in 1971 and now in 1999, I wrote to Vahyu Sena Bhavan offering my services. I believed and still believe that I could use my counselling skills with the wounded and their families. Things I learned to do successfully in the years after the Air Force. At the Biblical age of two-score years and ten, I can understand why I have not been recalled.
And so in despair, I watch Star News and BBC and count the body bags and go back to reading some poetry, which, with the intervention of the Lord, has been my lifelong refuge and strength. I open a book and stumble upon Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. I read the opening lines, My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk. No words can better describe how I feel.
But as days go by, the numbness is replaced by anger. We are a sick nation. We were told that “eternal vigilance is the price for liberty”. The Kargil war is a war of our unconscionable lack of vigilance. It is a war brought on by a total failure of intelligence; it is a war of political apathy verging on blindness. The type of blindness that Krishna Menon suffered from. But Krishna Menon resigned. We do not hear of any ministerial or bureaucratic heads rolling today. We are, on the other hand, witnessing the publication of full-page advertisements of the lists of the dead with footnotes to emphasise the patriotism of the caretaker government. Nothing could be more crass.
For sensitive and civilized people, ‘caretaker’ is a precious word. It involves love. Love of your country and of your people. It involves the courage to do what is right and the willingness to pay the price for it. In a nation that is sick, ‘caretaker’ means taking care of one-self for now, for the next elections and forever.
The nation is terribly sick. While the snow on the mountains along the Line of Control is turning red with the blood of our soldiers, self-appointed social workers and NGOs are collecting blood in the name of the jawans, to be sold locally at exorbitant prices. We have lost every vestige of shame.
While rules are being quoted to prevent ceremonial farewells for our dead soldiers at some airports, VIPs arrive and depart with hundreds of their cronies taking over the entire airport space, leaving the sweepers truckloads of garlands to clear.
There is hardly any Indian who’s not trying to get mileage from the devastating tragedy we are experiencing on those treacherous mountain lands. Land which has no FSI, no fluctuating prices except the terrible price of losing our freedom. A freedom safe-guarded for us not by politicians or bureaucrats, nor by industrialists or fundamentalist organisations who seem to control governments on both sides of the border, but by young, brave, tough lads who, if and when they return, will not find even a hundred square feet of space to claim as their own, to rest their weary and broken limbs.
If this is difficult to believe, you must watch the interviews on television with the families of soldiers who have fought previous wars. Frame after frame of lives in complete desolation and penury. Brave mothers, stone-faced widows and children with runny noses unable to afford school, playing with their father’s medals in disease-infected dust in villages with no water, no electricity and no medical facilities.
If government secretaries were sent packing to Siachen by George Fernandes; there are other categories that should go to Kargil. Hoodlums who blinded a motor- man because he did not stop at an unscheduled station. Shiv Sainiks who walk into schools and beat up the female staff and ransack the office, religious zealots who murder timid priests and rape helpless nuns. Terrorists who set families working with lepers on fire and dance around the ashes. Arsonists of movie theatres and self-appointed conscience-keepers who wreck cricket pitches and painting exhibitions with equal abandon. Muscled intimidators of the weak. They need a taste of Kargil. They, and the many corrupt who support them, and the many hundreds of others who are afraid to do their duty and prefer to look the other way.
In the meanwhile, in my frustration I turn to poetry and to the words of Tennyson.
Home they brought the warrior dead;
She nor swooned not uttered a cry;
All her maidens watching said, She must weep or she will die”.

We too must weep or we will die.
And the country will die with us.