At Home With The Bodies

"Pakistan is venal," she said to me one morning during the Kargil war,words I feel sure were spoken many times through those weeks – "Pakistan isvenal, but we are not." That day, we woke to news that Pakistan returned to ussix Indian soldiers’ bodies, all badly mutilated. A sick, gruesome thing todo; and wherever you looked, it caused outrage, thick and free-flowing. Myfriend was angry, greatly depressed too. She could not understand brutality thatdestroyed men like this, even in a war. 

And who could understand it? What possesses people who do such things toothers? What was achieved except revulsion and rage? Except six familiesshattered?

Yet this was war, and war pushes men into some ghastly deeds. In hisdevastating memoir With The Old Breed, Eugene Sledge writes of theAmerican campaigns on Pacific Ocean islands during World War II. A young Marinewho fought the Japanese long, hard and bitter in those campaigns, Sledge hadample cause to hate the men of the East. Nevertheless, he also describes, indetail that’s unsparingly revolting to read, atrocities his own colleaguescommitted. When I read his book, I remembered my friend. I remembered ourconversation, India’s war, and those six ruined families. 

After a battle on Peleliu island, a Marine came up dragging what Sledgeassumed was a Japanese corpse. Only, the man wasn’t dead. He "had beenwounded severely in the back", writes Sledge, "and couldn’t move his arms."The Marine sat down with his wounded jap. Took out his kabar, his Marine knife.Began... but here, in full, are Sledge’s own words about this incident: 

"The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and hiscaptor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hitthe handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feetand thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply intothe victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks opento each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again.Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashedwildly. I shouted, "Put the man out of his misery." All I got for an answerwas a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier'’brain and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting hisprizes undisturbed. 

"Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit whenreduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violentdeath, terror, tension, fatigue and filth that was the infantryman’swar." 

What happened to that Marine on Peleliu? What happened to the family of agold-toothed Japanese soldier who died so horribly on a flyspeck of a Pacificisland? What happened to the families of six Indian soldiers mutilated by war inKargil? 

Searching for some kind of answer to that last question, I made a long tripin a rattletrap Maruti with a take-no-prisoners driver. And through many bumpy,frightening, but always beautiful Himachal miles, through several hours spent ina house in a crowded Himachal town, Sledge and his colleagues and those glowingJapanese teeth – it wasn’t a human being the Marine went to work on, justlumps of gold, now isn’t that the truth? – turned slow circles at the backof my mind. For this was the home of the Kalias, and the elder son of this homeled five men on a patrol in Kargil in early May of 1999, and they were the firstArmy personnel to detect the Pakistani intrusion in the area, and they allreturned from the war soon after, mutilated and dead. 

And I had come here to meet this young man’s parents. 

A nation and its far-flung children rose in horrified anger when it heardwhat happened to Saurabh Kalia and his men. In a real sense, this incidentdefined us during Kargil. Never before had we been so fervent about a war, sosure that right was on our side; never before had we hated Pakistan so much. Andit was the deaths of these men, what happened to them in death, thatcrystallised those feelings for us. 

Saurabh’s father, Dr N K Kalia, told me that over a million people havesigned an appeal seeking justice for the six soldiers. Nearly 42,000 letters andbits of email have poured in expressing sympathy and support, and "we do nothave a count of telephone calls coming from every corner of the world." 

All this, because when Saurabh came home to his parents, his body hadcigarette burns on it, his bones had been broken, as had his teeth, his ears hadbeen pierced, his lips were cut, his nose chopped, his skull fractured and hiseyes removed. 

I could barely stomach reading these details in a letter Dr Kalia had writtento explain his son’s death. I could barely listen as this middle-aged couple,this utterly ordinary Indian mother and father in their ordinary Himachali home,spoke to me of what their son looked like in death and how they have had to cometo terms with it. 

What happened to Saurabh Kalia was nauseating. But if it was that, the entiretragedy was also inexplicable, and it remains so today. If you are willing tolook, he left behind some searching questions. If you are willing to think aboutthem, they will gnaw at you, as they gnaw at this parents. For there seems to beno answers, only questions, and that’s a hard place to be for parents, for anation, bereaved so brutally. 

If the bodies were so badly mutilated, why did Pakistan not just throw themaway? Why even bother to hand them over? Was that country unaware of theopprobrium and outrage that would result? Why did India not make an immediateand loud fuss right there at the border? Why whisk the six dead soldiers awayfor a closed-door post-mortem in Delhi? 

And the mystifying – there’s no other way to describe them – officialreactions to Saurabh Kalia’s death only make matters more inexplicable. 

Among Dr Kalia’s piles of mail are letters from External Affairs MinisterJaswant Singh, Defence Minister George Fernandes, Prime Minister Atal BehariVajpayee and the Army’s Director General (Organization & Personnel) Lt.General HS Bagga. I mention these letters not for the eminence of the men whowrote them, but for the eloquence of the words they use to describe Saurabh: "martyr","valiant son" and "hero of Kargil" are just some. Jaswant Singh had therichest tributes: 

"Captain Saurabh Kalia made the supreme sacrifice in the defense ofour Motherland. He displayed great valour, courage and determination in thepursuit of his goal to push out the Pakistani forces that had intruded into ourterritory. History will record Captain Kalia’s deeds in golden letters and hisname will be a beacon for many generations not only for officers and men of theArmed Forces, but for all Indians. As a father, you have been blessed to havesuch a gallant son." 

On record, in black and white: these are unequivocal acknowledgements of thevalour of the son of this Himachali home. For a sorrowing family, they must havecome as some small solace. 

And so I find it hard to comprehend the peculiar reality Saurabh’s parentsmust grapple with: Captain Kalia is conspicuously missing from the long list ofKargil veterans awarded decorations. So are his patrol-mates. For these Indianheroes, there is no Param Vir Chakra, no Vishisht Seva Medal, not even aMentioned-In-Dispatches. Nothing, "History will record Captain Kalia’s deedsin golden letters," but India is unwilling to honour him.We were so moved byhis courage, so revulsed by the violation of the man’s body, so loud incondemning a "venal" Pakistan. But India remains unwilling to honourhim. 

Why? 

In its October 2 cover story, Outlook magazine has one answer to that.For Kalia and his men were from the 4 Jat Regiment and Outlook reporttells us: 

"(The) 3 Punjab, 4 Jat and 16 Grenadiers (regiments) took the bruntof the battle in the first month… And yet none of these three units received asingle gallantry award… (T)his discrimination prompted Lt Gen H B Kala, theten Western Army Commander, to write to (Army Chief) Gen Malik. Kala(complained) that his own 4 Jat Regiment had been ignored for the gallantryawards… (T)he vice-chief, Lt Gen. Chandrashekhar, (replied) saying that therewas no question of decorating these battalions or the men and the army wouldpunish them for failing to detect intruders in Kargil."

 "Punish them." Think of it. 

Presumably the vice-chief meant the intruders were detected later than theyshould have been. Still, think of it. Saurabh Kalia’s patrol stumpled upon theintruders whom thousands of other Indian soldiers then fought for ten weeks tothrow out. They paid for that discovery with their lives, with the barbarismthat found them in turn. Some of the country’s most exalted men said someexalted things in praise of this Saurabh Kalia. Now his own Army chooses to "punish"him for his pain. 

In this soldier’s home, I sat eating a sumptuous lunch that, in a happiertime, he might have joined me at. I sat surrounded by flowers and portraits andinnumerable tributes to him. I sat there, and the thought came to me that this"punishment" was about the most mindlessly perverse thing I had ever runinto. 

Unless, of course, you count his mutilation. Unless you count the war itself.For perversity of every kind is an ancient tradition in war, and our war inKashmir is no exception. 

So as I rode homeward from that house in Himachal, our continuing enmity withPakistan slowly crowded all else out of my thoughts. It didn’t help that whenyou travel in Himachal, Army convoys regularly rumble past. They just seemed topunctuate the depressing questions, ever more questions, that bubbled up.

 Just why did this family lose their son? Why do we send some of ourfinest young men into this cauldron of "violent death, terror, tension,fatigue and filth"? Why have we been doing it for half a century? When will itend? Is outrage reserved only for those who torture during a war? Or should wealso turn it towards the men – Indian and Pakistani alike – who keep peaceso distant that brave soldiers are lost to that cauldron daily? Who urge us todefine ourselves by how much hatred we direct across the border? Who rouse us tosuch lock-stepped hostility that a favourite chimera, the machinations of the"foreign hand," can blind us to all that is shameful within our owncountries? 

I know, as I write, that some would say I must not ask such questions. Forthey "undermine" the country. It is "unpatriotic" to raise them at atime when our soldiers are fighting and dying for the "glory" of themotherland. 

At war in the Pacific, Eugene Sledge had frequent thoughts about just such"glory". There was the time he saw a fellow Marine standing over the body ofa Japanese officer killed on Okinawa. The Marine. 

"held his rifle… with both hands and slowly and mechanically movedit up and down like a plunger. I winced each time it came down with a sickeningthud into the gory mass. Brains and blood were splattered all over (his) rifle(and clothes)… Replete with violence, shock, blood, gore and suffering, thiswas the type of incident that should be witnessed by anyone who has anydelusions about the glory of war." 

Not much glory there. Nearer home, six men died in bloody horror on ourborder, but it is anti-national to ask why they died. The six are deliberatelyoverlooked for military awards, but true patriots will not question thatstrangely dissonant note from the Kargil victory trumpets. Well inside ourborders, men die screaming deaths in police custody, but it is a slap to ournational well being to mention such homegrown brutality in the same breath astorture from across the Line of Control. 

This is what patriotism has come to mean to us. This unwillingness to airdoubts, or let them be aired. This deliberate, unquestioned hatred of Pakistan,coupled with a complacent certainty of our moral superiority. This steady,unstinted, rah-rah fervour over the endless, wearying, blood-sucking war wefight with Pakistan. No matter how many of our uniformed youth die. Nor howsickeningly. Nor how miserably they live on the frontlines. We pretend there is"glory" in what they do and think that gives us the right to demand enormoussacrifices from them. 

But does it really? 

The lesson Sledge learned in the Pacific, the one we can learn from thetragedy that overwhelmed the Kalia family, is this: there is nothing gloriousabout war. There is nothing glorious about this one war we have fought for halfa century, that we are no closer to resolving than when we began. 

What happened to those six men on patrol outraged us, as it should have.Nevertheless, this is war. As you read this, there are "decent men" fightingfiercely all along our border. As you read this, decent men are witnessing andcommitting and falling victim to incomprehensible brutality there. War doesthat. As it did in Kalinga, as it did in Chechnya, as it did on that flyspeck inthe Pacific, as it always has done. 

And it seems to me that as long as we in this part of the world – Indian orPakistani – keep war going with our neighbour, it will bring us moreperversity and more incredible cruelty. More mangled bodies. War cannot be wagedwithout all that. 

Now that is the horror that will have to outrage us some day.