Aarti Tikoo Singh - Pathribal and Patriotism
At the risk of being demonized and dubbed as a renegade, one must still ask why soldiers implicated in innocent civilian killings should enjoy absolute impunity and how such exemption serves the country and its constitution
The idea of patriotism is not necessarily or inherently “a pernicious psychopathic form of idiocy” that the witty Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw called it once. Human feelings of love and attachment with one’s place of birth and upbringing and selfless service for its betterment, after all, are benign, natural and perhaps, evolutionary too. But patriotic notions can become exactly the idiocy Shaw referred to when individuals or institutions symbolizing patriotism attain stature of unquestionable gods and dogmatic religions.
The Indian Army which remains emblematic of supreme patriotism, has unfortunately become one such institution that cannot be evaluated critically. Any censure of the Army, no matter how decadent and corrupt the institution may be, is an invitation to earn the blemish of being anti-patriotic, anti-national, seditious and traitorous. Drawing attention to the evidence of Army’s institutional malfeasance is overlooked completely in all socio-political discourse.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) 2012 report that indicted the Army in the Pathribal extrajudicial killings, for example, remained an irrelevant proof against the Army's word. The Indian Army last week closed the case that accused its officials of killing five innocent Kashmiri Muslim youth in Pathribal village of Anantnag district in the Kashmir valley following the massacre of 34 Sikhs in Chattisinghpora by Lashkar-e-Taiba in March 2000. The reverence for the Army is so deep that patriots find it difficult to trust CBI’s report that incriminated the Army for wiping out all the evidence by blowing up and burning the hut where the victims had been shot dead. A patriot is unwilling to ask why the CBI called the Army’s ‘encounter killings’ “cold-blooded murders” and held five Army officials responsible for the murders and sought exemplary punishment for them.
Indian patriotism does not accommodate questions such as why the Centre invoked the Armed Forces Special Powers Acts (AFSPA) that grants, besides enormous powers to the Indian Army in disturbed areas, dangerously the right to have infinite legal immunity. Or why the senior counsel Ashok Bhan, a Kashmiri Pandit, would tell the court that the AFSPA was intended to protect any action of the Army only done in exercise of official duty. Or why the CBI argued that it was necessary to prosecute the Army officials to ensure "public confidence in the rule of law and dispensation of justice."
It is again meaningless to patriots to ask why the Supreme Court in January 2012 pulled up the Centre and the Army for denying justice to the victims but only three months later, gave the army a choice to try the accused either by court-martial or by criminal courts. It is unpatriotic to ask if the Army was encouraged by the court’s free pass and if it led to its own acquittal. It is no bother to a patriot's conscience that the Indian Army lied to the country that the Pathribal youth were the terrorists responsible for the massacre.
Both the mainstream opposition parties and the 24 hours hyperventilating electronic media, therefore, did not consider the denial of justice by the Army worth any patriotism. The Army allowed itself to be guilt- free and its worshippers to remain sightless. The travesty is not only that justice was denied in the Pathribal case but also that the very act remained unchallenged under the convenience of blind patriotism of the citizens.
So why has Indian patriotism, that originates from the very principles and duties enshrined in the Constitution, come to mean not questioning institutions such as the Army? Why has Indian patriotism begun to fit the description that Shaw chose for it? Why has Indian patriotism taken the epithet of ‘blind’? Because somewhere down the line, our selfless service to India got determined not by our moderate, liberal and inclusive constitutional ideals but by illiberal and exclusive ethno-religious or cultural mores. This trend in India started since the rise, rather revival, of the Hindu Right wing and the fabrication of a glorified monolithic Hindu past, tradition, culture, customs, rituals and values.
The Hindu Right wing revivalists cherry pick and associate only certain ideas of the Indian Constitution with patriotism. Socialism and secularism, as such, are not patriotic values but integrity of the union is; protection of minorities is not a patriotic value but protection of national symbols is. Patriotism has thus been redefined in the lexicon of the Hindu Right and only select institutions epitomizing patriotism are therefore immune to scrutiny. Constitutional patriotism, which was meant to uphold the constitutional ideals (including constructive criticism) in totality, has been replaced with discriminatory and blind patriotism. It is this untempered patriotism that trusts the Army’s word against the CBI evidence.
It would be unpatriotic indeed, even from a constitutional point of view, to disparage Army’s services to the country. The Indian Army has made immense sacrifices during the defense of the borders and citizens of the Republic in the last 65 years. Those sacrifices rightly place the institution at the highest pedestal of patriotic veneration. But it is disservice to the Constitution and constitutional patriotism if the Army is the accused and also gets to be the judge, jury and pardoner itself and most patriots choose to stay quiet about it. Constitutional patriotism will be undermined if the truthification of lies told by the Indian Army in the Pathribal case goes unchallenged, if the excesses and human rights abuse the Army has committed against the people it is supposed to defend are not questioned. At the risk of being demonized and dubbed as a renegade, one must still ask why soldiers implicated in innocent civilian killings should enjoy absolute impunity and how such exemption serves the country and its constitution. One must still ask if state abuse and impunity could be the undoing of a liberal constitutional democracy.
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