The Prime Minister owes it to the nation to quickly announce full compensation and rehabilitation for the families of the sixteen Border Security Force soldiers butchered by Bangladesh Rifles in a remote Meghalaya village. Pictures of the insulting manner in which Bangladesh returned the highly decomposed bodies – with corpses tied and slung across poles, like shikaris carting off a ‘kill’ – coupled with detailed reports from responsible officers about torture, mutilation, and cold-blooded murder, have given rise to deep public anger at the unprovoked outrage.
The deaths, as BSF Director General Gurbachan Jagat has said, are custodial; the result of premeditated action by Bangladesh Rifles, not anonymous villagers. The presence of injuries with sharp and blunt instruments, burn marks suggesting boiling water was poured over the men, broken bones, evidence of strangulation and shooting through the eyes at point blank range, all point to a calibrated assault by persons familiar with the art of torture and killing. In fact, the bodies were in such bad shape that BSF authorities could hardly identify them, and had to perform the last rites themselves to save innocent families the trauma of handling such tortured bodies.
Sadly, the pervasive impression in this sordid episode is that the Indian Government is complicit in covering up the naked aggression as the unilateral action of a ‘fundamentalist’ who does not want Sheikh Hasina Wajed to return to power in the next elections. This, as Mr. Chandan Mitra has cogently argued (Pioneer, 22 April 2001), strains credulity, as thirty armoured personnel carriers of the Bangladesh Army also got into the act. What is disturbing, however, is the suggestion that for some exalted non-nationalist principle, India must spare Sheikh Hasina from embarrassing questions about the episode, as this may adversely impact her chances in the forthcoming polls. Proponents of this theory do not want India to demand a proper apology, nor compensation for the murdered men. Surely the people have a right to know what stake India can possibly have in the political survival of Sheikh Hasina if she cannot punish the perpetrators of the crime and promise to ensure that such incidents are not repeated.
If domestic compulsions require Sheikh Hasina to appear unsympathetic towards India, then New Delhi may be better off dealing with an openly hostile regime in Dacca, rather than help prop up one that cannot address our legitimate concerns. It is high time Indian policy makers learnt some lessons from our own history – at Shimla, we made unwarranted compromises with Pakistan in the vain hope that a civilian regime would be friendlier than a military dictatorship. We paid a bloody price in Punjab; we are paying a gory price in Kashmir.
It is high time we shed our self-created fantasies and faced some hard questions. Why it is good politics to be anti-India in Bangladesh, a country to whom we gifted freedom by going to war against Pakistan, risking the wrath of the Nixon administration and isolation in the international community? The answer lies in our history – in the unresolved civilizational stalemate that resulted in Partition, and the unfortunate ascent of Jawaharlal Nehru who fatally wounded the Hindu consciousness by negating the nation’s civilizational ethos on the specious plea of containing ‘majority communalism.’ My point is that once Nehru denied the fledgling modern nation the security, grandeur and continuity of its ancient civilizational moorings, he dealt a savage blow to its national memory, pride, self-confidence, and sense of identity.
As a result, India could no longer define itself in terms of its Self (Atman), and tended to adopt the biased opinions of others. It fell prey to fragmentation and incoherence, and failed to draw appropriate lessons from its own history. It is, for instance, widely agreed (even by the inventive, revisionist Left historians) that the single-most important incident that made Partition inevitable was the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946. After independence, political authority in Pakistan vested in its western part up to 1971, when India liberated East Pakistan. It was, throughout, an Indian fiction that Bangladesh was ‘grateful’ and ‘friendly.’ Mr. Mitra writes of his shock at the poster war against India only four months after the war; his candour is refreshing in this era of secular pusillanimity.
The crux of the matter is identity. The former East Pakistan has neither forgotten, nor negated, its reasons for separation from India. Bangladesh never had rabid hate-India leaders of the type West Pakistan did, but it has no warmth towards us. Despite the common Bengali language, it does not profess a common civilizational heritage (this would invalidate its Islamic identity and the legitimacy of Partition). This is why anti-India sentiments gained ground so soon after the 1971 war. This is also why Bangladesh permits the ISI to use its soil for anti-India campaigns – border districts of West Bengal sprout madrasas daily, the north-east is dangerously penetrated, and the entire Indo-Nepal border is a hotbed of militancy. India is encircled by a hostile civilizational entity; we can ignore this truth only at our peril.
No nation compromises its self-respect in dealing with others, especially in times of crisis. China could command international awe in dealing with America on the spy plane episode precisely because the Communist Government projected itself as legitimate ruler of the Han people; its dissident intellectuals did not use the opportunity to settle scores with the regime. In contrast, the Vajpayee Government has cut a sorry figure making excuses for Sheikh Hasina’s government, instead of expressing the resentment and anguish of the Indian people. Major political parties, including the ruling BJP, are mum, no doubt because of the impact this may have on Muslim votes in the forthcoming elections in some states. In this scenario, Muslim intellectuals and leaders have naturally not felt obliged to even formally condemn the outrage, as they did during the Kandahar hijack (when they feared riots) and the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas (when world opinion was focused on the episode).
Unfortunately, this is not the sole instance of the Vajpayee government’s inability or reluctance to face the issue of torture and mutilation. During Kargil, Mr. Jaswant Singh claimed that the bodies of five soldiers handed over by Pakistani authorities bore evidence of mutilation. Later, however, the government dropped the charges for reasons not adequately explained, though it may be mentioned that the secular press was hostile to raking up the issue and even sought to deny it. Last year, the brutal slaughter of some Hindu police informers in Kashmir, allegedly by state police officers themselves, was reported prominently in a national daily, and then blacked out completely. English language dailies did not even report the protest rally, held in the capital, against the incident.
The BSF affair has acquired a different complexion because of the numbers involved, the conscious decision of senior officers to speak up for the men, and the offensive visuals of the return of the bodies. As two injured jawans battle for their lives, the Prime Minister must realize that he was put in office because he promised to speak up for India, in the name of its foundational ethos. If Mr. Vajpayee wishes to retain the respect of ordinary citizens, he must compel Bangladesh to proffer a fulsome apology. His Government must also make uncompromising efforts to identify and push back infiltrators who are altering the country’s demographic profile with consequences that are there for all to see.
The Pioneer, 24 April 2001