It was a wintry night in New Delhi when we boarded the train for the nearly 850km journey to Nagpur. I was assigned to cover a Ranji Trophy cricket match and was supposed to have travelled in relative second class luxury, but when we arrived at the railway station we learnt that the man tasked with arranging our tickets had pulled a fast one on us and disappeared with the money.
With the festive season due, all trains were packed to capacity, leaving us with no option but to buy current tickets and cram ourselves into an unreserved car with wooden seats and stinking toilets. To add to our misery, most of the windows of the bogie were broken, and as the Jammutawi-Madras Express picked up speed, the November chill almost froze us to the bone.
But our plight was still bearable. On a berth in the next compartment, Selvaraj lay writhing in agony, his faint, mournful groans suggesting extreme discomfort. He was a soldier and was being encouraged to hang on by his colleagues until they got to Madras (now Chennai) some 1,600km away.
I thought he was suffering from some illness, but a closer inspection revealed he was bleeding from a wound in his thigh which his colleagues kept wrapping up in bandage. As it turned out Selvaraj had accidentally shot himself at his base somewhere in northern India just before his vacation started, but fearing official apathy had chosen not to report the incident to his superiors.
“He would have had to answer lots of questions if he approached his superiors with the wound and could have even lost his job,” one of the soldiers accompanying him told me. Selvaraj was barely 25 but had already gained an insight into the working of the army. Never trust your superiors: that, tragically, seemed to be the lesson he had learnt.
It did not surprise me one bit. I have seen with my own eyes Indian soldiers doing things that are beneath the dignity of their profession. They run errands for their bosses, like dropping their children at school and buying grocery. They water the plants in the compounds of large government bungalows the army gives its majors and colonels. They even salute their superiors’ wives and drop them to kitty parties.
I remember a conversation I once had with an army major who told me how he kept the soldiers under his command busy throughout the day so that they didn’t have time for anything else, because a soldier with lots of free time was like a “dangerous walking weapon”.
“They (the soldiers) are ordered to wake up at 4.30am. After three hours of rigorous physical training, they eat their breakfast. Then they train further. After that we make them work so hard in the day that they immediately fall asleep after dinner. We ensure that they don’t even have the energy to think,” the major said, adding, “A soldier is only supposed to follow orders, not think.”
It struck me as grossly unfair. The ordinary Indian soldier is someone who just manages to scrape by when he is alive and gets celebrated only in death as a martyr, especially if death occurs during battle. Then his family would be rewarded by the government with money and praise he would have never had in his lifetime. Maybe he would even get a last ride in a fancy, scam-tainted coffin, as it happened after the Kargil conflict in 1999.
A few years ago, India’s Supreme Court took the government to task for treating soldiers shabbily after it came to light that a disabled army man was being paid a paltry Rs1,000 a month as pension.
The court came down hard on the Centre and dismissed its appeal challenging a Punjab and Haryana High Court direction to pay a higher pension to C S Sidhu, a short service commissioned officer. Sidhu’s right arm had to be amputated after an accident while on duty at a high altitude post on November 21, 1970.
“This is a pittance. If this is the manner in which the army personnel are treated, it is extremely unfortunate,” a bench of Justices Markandeya Katju and A K Patnaik said then.
“The army personnel are bravely defending the country even at the cost of their lives and we feel they should be treated in a better and more humane manner by government authorities, particularly, in respect of their emoluments, pension and other benefits,” the judges added.
When in 2010, 76 personnel of India’s Central Reserve Police force (CRPF) were killed by Maoist terrorists in Central India’s Dantewada village, reports emerged of their pathetic living conditions, outdated equipment and a general disregard for their wellbeing on the part of the government. The reports only served to confirm suspicions that all was not well with the country’s defence set-up.
So what has changed in all these years? Practically little, one is forced to say. The Narendra Modi-led government is facing flak now after a video emerged of a soldier lamenting his pathetic existence. Constable Tej Bahadur Yadav complained that ordinary soldiers had to make do with only dry chapatis and watery dal curry while on duty in freezing temperatures. According to him, his superiors sold the free provisions meant for the soldiers in the open market and made money illegally.
The video opened up a can of worms and sent the army and the government scrambling for a logical explanation, with the army chief and the home minister assuring swift action. And swiftly enough, Yadav has been branded a chronic alcoholic and a serial offender by his organisation, the Border Security Force! To add insult to injury, he has been assigned plumbing duties.
Immediately after the video went viral, a few similar videos appeared, but matters really took a grave turn on Thursday when a paramilitary soldier from one of India’s elite security units shot dead four of his senior officers. The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) soldier was stressed because he had not been allowed to go on leave by his superiors. This is not the first time a soldier has killed his colleagues or superiors in a fit of rage. Even suicides are common in the army. According to estimates about 100 soldiers kill themselves every year, mostly during their postings in tense regions.
As a kid I remember being caught up in a swirl of patriotic fervour whenever I heard slogans such as ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’ (long live the soldier, long live the farmer). But these days, it fails to resonate with me, and probably many others. With farmers, too, taking their own lives in their thousands because of mounting debts due to crop failures, the purportedly celebratory slogan has acquired a melancholic tone. Ironical for a country that boasts a 7.5% growth rate and sees itself as a future superpower.
*Anil John is Sports Editor of Gulf Times.