Missing IAF aircraft: Our hypocrisy regarding military lives is disgusting

It has been three days since an Indian Air Force An-32 military aircraft went missing.

It was carrying 29 personnel, six of them crew members, and eight of them family members of military personnel. There is now little hope of finding the people alive. As such it ranks amongst the biggest loss of life for our military personnel in recent months.

According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, this number is almost equal to all of the military personnel who have died in Jammu and Kashmir this year.

And yet, on Twitter, what is trending is Salman Khan. After a day on the front page of newspapers, and only some newspapers at that, this news item has disappeared.

Our blowhard TV patriots, those who are so gung-ho that they have managed to turn peaceful areas into protesting areas, have nothing to say. The same news channels, and the same newspapers, had wall-to-wall coverage of the missing Malaysian Airlines MH 370 for days, weeks even.

And do you know how many Indians were aboard that flight? Five. Just five. For some reason their lives were far more important, that tragedy was far more relevant than one that is six times as large.

This is hardly the only time such hypocrisy has been exposed. As Praveen Donthi writes in from the Valley, the same soldier who dies in Kashmir (and is lauded for it), is not even allowed a space in his own village for cremation, because he is a Dalit.

For both our hypernationalists and our human rights-wallahs, it seems our military personnel only matter when they our doing our dirty work.

It becomes convenient for the armchair warriors, those who have not, and will not sacrifice anything (except maybe their Indian passports as they run off to rant and rave in the US like Rajiv Malhotra), to be patriotic about our soldiers, to wail and mourn them. At the same time, civilian leaders like P Chidambaram can conveniently pass on the blame for human rights abuses only to the soldiers.

When Chidambaram calls the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) "obnoxious" - which it is - he somehow conveniently forgets that the AFSPA was not drafted by the military. It was drafted by civilian political leaders like himself. It was also the civilian political leaders who chose to deploy the military in a civil conflict - whether in the Northeast, or in Jammu and Kashmir.

It is also in the power of civilian political leaders to either withdraw the military from civilian areas, or to amend, or withdraw the AFSPA. Blaming the military for decisions made by politicians is a straightforward lie.

India is a democratic republic where the civilian leadership is in charge of decision-making. Except that when the problems become really difficult, it throws the military into the mix, letting the soldiers and civilians hammer at each other because the politicians are too cowardly to make decisions.

In both Punjab and Tripura, the only domestic insurgencies we can count as "successes" even though they were bloody-handed ones, the police and politicians led.

Similarly, the success in Andhra Pradesh against the Naxals was through the deployment of armed local police units, the "Greyhounds".

The deployment of the military to quell civil unrest is the passing off of responsibility for political decisions. And, as is obvious from the various conflicts where the military has been deployed in India versus the empowerment of local police and politicians, it does not work.

Despite clear proof of this through the 69 years of our history as a republic, you will still have people lining up either to blindly support the military or blindly oppose it.

This loud yelling in favour or against the military is only designed to hide one thing: the fact that the military is only a tool of policy, and it is the policy that we should be questioning, not the tool deployed to implement it.

A carpenter who uses a hammer instead of a saw will damage both what he is trying to build as well as the hammer.

And everybody will call him an idiot. It is a good description of our political class, too, which cares little or nothing about the military that it says it supports, but in reality is only using as a tool to cover up its own failure and cowardice.

And those 29 personnel onboard the ill-fated An-32 - take a little time to think of them - they were our people too, their lives lost is a tragedy that should affect us all.