PRIME-TIME
WAR
The smoke from the funeral pyres drifts skywards. A
grim-faced honour guard reverses arms. A lone bugler sounds the last post. This is how we
say farewell to men of arms who die in battle. It's an image that fills the screens of 22
million homes every day as a television-age India watches the final journey of its dead
soldiers -- over dinner.
Dinner is what the parents of Sergeant Raj Kishore Sahu, 28,
were having on May 28 when they heard about the downing of a Mi-17 helicopter gunship by a
Stinger missile. And as they listened disbelieving, the television news anchor read out
Sahu's name among the four crew who died over Kargil's icy battlefield. The official
telegram saying that the President of India regretted to inform them of the death of Sgt
Sahu arrived after the family had gone into shock.
In the media-driven US, a soldier's family never learns of
his or her death from the media. Names are never released until a messenger reaches the
family first. That's supposed to be Indian practice as well, but this is just one of the
problems India is struggling with during its first major conflict in this age of
television. The human aspect apart, official media managers quickly realised that
unguarded comments are magnified hugely -- like George Fernandes' offer to consider safe
passage for militants, a military spokesman's reference to the "war" in Kargil
-- by a forest of television mikes, notebooks and tape-recorders.
India's first conflict in the information age is creating a
direct impact on policy makers, the armed forces, the families of the dead -- and public
opinion. "Television has changed everything," says Maroof Raza, former NDTV
defence expert and fellow, department of war studies at King's College, London.
"Earlier you could lose 1,000 people and hide it, now you can't." So great care
is taken over daily military briefings; every word now has connotations. Consider how the
spokesman who talked of a "war" in Kargil was immediately replaced. Or how the
government hastily launched damage-control after anger over Fernandes' remarks.
In an election year, slip ups can slide into political
disaster. Conversely, politicians could use the emotions generated to prolong the
conflict. India isn't the US, where body bags spur instant demands to bring the boys back
home. "We've received more than 50,000 letters and e-mails in support of our
soldiers," says Group Captain K. Rajaram, air force spokesman.
Families struggle with their grief but they also tell a
spellbound nation where honour is paramount, of their pride in their sons, fathers and
husbands dying on the frontiers. "Ajay, I am proud of you," said a choked Alka
Ahuja, grieving wife of Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja when she first saw her husband's
casket. "He died so that we may live," his father Purushottam Lal Ahuja
whispered over and over.
Yet India isn't entirely clear about what exactly is going on
in those frigid heights: what units are fighting, are they equipped for such warfare, and
how are they dying? The coffins simply flow into Delhi's Palam airport, bound for their
final resting places in every corner of India: Naik Lal Singh to Mahendragarh in Haryana,
sepoy Gangching to Nagaland. Just names who, the government monotonously says, made
"the supreme sacrifice".
"We've got a lot to think about," says
Major-General (retd) Afsir Karim, member of the National Security Advisory Board. Despite
TV, despite the hordes of reporters nosing around Bofors batteries and the wreckage of
Drass and Kargil, the battle behind the mountains is off limits, and incredibly remote.
"The Pakistanis," notes Karim "might as well be on the moon."
This confusion is in direct contrast to how the military and
media work in post Cold War conflicts, where the objectives of the media and military run
parallel and often converge. Like the Bosnian conflict where western intervention was
driven by media reporting. Like the landing of US marines in Somalia in 1992,
Pentagon-timed for prime-time transmission on a beach where massed camera men lit them up,
in the words of an Associated Press report, "like Macy's at Christmas".
After the war in Vietnam, the western world realised the
emotional power of satellite television as the driving force of foreign and domestic
policy. "There's no question that opinion is moulded by television," says
Lt-General (retd) Satish Nambiar, director of the United Services Institute, a think tank.
"And it's the best way to put across the establishment line." The dinner-time
funerals are just beginning.
Samar Halarnkar |
