Pakistan’s Endless Lies & India’s Gutless Pundits
Kunal Verma
After the Kargil War, I was filming the eight Pakistani prisoners who had been captured by us in the Dras and Batalik Sectors. The Army PROs had told the POWs that I was from the Red Cross or some such bullshit in the hope that they would talk on camera. The first thing I did with each of them was to tell them that I was from no such organization. I also told them point blank that their country was denying that their Army had been a part of the infiltration and their best chance of returning to Pakistan was to talk turkey and tell the truth or languish in our jails for years. The fear of God and the fact that they would never see their families again worked and they began to talk – all eight of them. As ordinary soldiers they didn’t know too much, but what they said was detailed and clearly established how their regular units had moved into position masquerading as ‘mujahideen’.
The visuals of those men, some with bandages on their eyes, was flashed on virtually every television channel and within a week the eight POWs were flown back to Pakistan. That footage is still with me, and the verbal evidence of the POWs blows whatever fig leaf of cover the Pakistani establishment ever had.
Kargil was not a one off thing. The same thing had happened in Jammu and Kashmir in 1948. From day one the Government of Pakistan had gone blue in the face repeating ad nauseam that their Army was not involved. Their entire case in the United Nations was based on that one big lie which we could never convincingly expose, despite the fact that Western journalists had splashed photographs of the active involvement of the Pakistan Armed Forces. For my book, The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why I found some of these images fairly easily, yet no one on the Indian side felt the need to aggressively nail this great big lie. Years later, when Pakistani officers began to publish their own stories, we still did nothing to counter this propaganda.
As a nation, we are pathetic when it comes to remembering our history or honouring the brave men who died defending this country – sixty-five years on and our political leadership grudges them even a National War Memorial! Not surprising then that October 1947 in Baramula has all but been forgotten, when the tribal lashkar pulled out and raped virtually every woman and girl in the town; or for that matter forgotten the chilling words when Skardu fell and the Pakistani field commander wired back “All Sikhs killed and women raped” or words to that affect.
In 1965 they did it again, and then again in 1971, even when the Pakistan Army was fighting for its survival in Bangladesh, they tortured and mutilated our boys. 22 Rajput at Madhumati had two men stripped naked and dragged through the streets behind jeeps while others were tied to trees and their eyes were gouged out! The Indian Government’s response was predictable – 22 Rajput was pulled out of the Eastern Theatre. The Pakistan Army which had behaved in the most barbaric manner possible with the people of Bangladesh were then protected by us from the Mukti Bahini and 93,000 POWs were sent back by a preening Indian Government while some of our own boys even today are reportedly languishing in their jails. Not one of the Pakistani soldiers was tried for war crimes.
Our Parliament is attacked and Mumbai is held hostage by ‘non-state actors’, Kashmir has been on fire for thirty years thanks to our hostile friends across the border and all we do is sanctimoniously talk of CBMs and signing Track 2 ‘deals’ where we want to talk of demilitarization of Siachen based on some ridiculous sentimental hogwash of being brothers who have been separated at birth! We want to play cricket and hold hands and sing songs and write articles about ‘Aman ki Aasha’. Sure, there’s nothing wrong in building people to people contacts and keeping dialogue open, but surely it must be on our terms.
And now this! Pakistani soldiers behead our boys and we wring our hands in collective anguish. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US?
We’ve brought this upon ourselves! We can’t protect our women, we can’t look after our farmers, or our soldiers – either on the borders or in Chattisgarh – we can’t take a damn step any more without being surrounded with the stench of corruption. As a people we have failed and the Government of India, which is us, have failed the country as we squabble at every level. Every institution is today under attack – be it the Army, the Police or the Judiciary. We watch as our Parliamentarians make monkeys of themselves in the highest edifices of democracy and then go scuttling into their homes behind a barricade of police protection and barbed wire when our children take to the streets. Just imagine what would have happened if the President of India had walked down the Raisina Hill slope and embraced the anguished youth and shared their concern. All we got was lip service. And water canons and a few lathi charges.
The underlying message of these protests – be it Anna Hazare or Ramdev or Kejriwal or Sangeeta, Radhika, Madhulika, Meena or Jyoti is the same, even if our screaming, sometimes hysterical media misses it! THE PEOPLE ARE CRYING OUT FOR BETTER GOVERNANCE! Every scandal – be it the CWG, 2G, 3G, Coalgate, Kodankulam or FDI, is a nail in our crumbling wall. When your intestines are bleeding, your women being raped, your fishermen are being shot by drunk Italian Guards as sport, and all you do is make shrill noises on TV, do you seriously expect the enemy sitting beyond your gate to shake his head in sympathy or do you expect him to hit you even harder. If he takes away your heads, it anguishes us today. But as we have regularly demonstrated, we will do nothing about it.
I have two simple suggestions:
The media must stop covering the Pakistan border. A complete news black out on anything concerning the LOC. The Indian Army is more than capable of making the people who did this heinous act pay. Just leave the Army alone. It is their ghost and they will burry it at their time of choosing.
Enforce a Naval economic blockade of Karachi until Dawood Ibrahim, the perpetuators of the Mumbai Attack, and the Pakistani Army personnel who beheaded our boys in 2011 in Kupwara and now in Mendhar are handed over. There should be no compromise on this. The Indian Navy has had a virtual son-in-law status since Independence and all the talk of a blue water Navy now needs to be put to the test. Choke Pakistan economically so that they hurt. Neither the Army nor the IAF have the numerical superiority over Pakistan to conduct any surgical retaliation strike. The Navy on the other hand, has a major edge over the Pakistan Navy. If the rest of the world, especially the US, has a problem with this, tell them to go to hell and shut the door behind them!
Kunal Verma is the author of The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why and The Northeast Trilogy. A filmmaker, he has been professionally associated with the Armed Forces for over two decades. His films include The Standard Bearers (National Defence Academy), The Making of a Warrior (Indian Military Academy), Salt of the Earth and Aakash Yodha (IAF), The Naval Dimension and Kashmir: Baramula to Kargil among others. The recently published Northeast Trilogy documents the entire Northeastern region of India.
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