All men are equal.
Well, if you say so. But their deaths surely aren’t.
On the 27th of February 2019, a day after India’s Balakot ‘revenge’ airstrikes inside Pakistan territory, the news screens briefly flashed the scene of a crash site. An IAF (short for Indian Air Force) chopper crashes in Kashmir. Six IAF men dead.
I saw it too. Metal mortal remains of a helicopter, too disintegrated to even cough up a proper smoke.
Six of our men? So fast? I wondered, especially when we should have been at the height of preparedness, expecting retaliation from the enemy!
How did it crash? No one seemed to ask. Who killed our men? Nope, no questions.
There was silence on the screaming television screens splattered with animated handle-bar moustaches and hasty, off-putting animations of ageing Indian MiGs blasting the fuck out of American F-16s. They served the patriotism on steroids alright, but didn’t answer my questions.
I vividly remember being uncomfortable at the disturbing partiality of the casualties. And more at what seemed to me like a manufactured confusion. I felt as if something was scheming against me, something that wants to smother what I so much wanted to know.
From that day onward, I have tried to scour the internet several times, trying to find an answer. And answer I did get, finally, after about two months, ostensibly after a ‘probe’ put the blame on our own Indian Air Force missile that was fired by mistake. On that day, I sat down to write this article, and laughed a bit on the incredulity and obviousness of it all. Hah!
With all the technology at our disposal, it takes us a moment to know who downed our MiG, but months to figure out who killed so many of our men. But romantic stories must end as they should end. Happily. So you could be an absolute idiot to expect the probe results to have come out before the elections. And congenitally, intellectually blind to not see the link.
But I wouldn’t jump to blame the key forces behind this late ‘discovery’. The world doesn’t run on standard-two mathematics anyway. Idealism and Rationalism might reluctantly share a house, but never the bed.
But all I want to know today is who these men were. Where they were from and how they looked like. The brave men who also died on duty, delivered a death no lesser, not a caste below martyrdom. They too deserve to be rewarded with the consciousness of the people they protected. To be registered, even if briefly, on the collective transience of a billion memories, before the nation has moved on. Before the enthusiasm of patriotism is lost in the muck of a sputtering economy and the story-scavenging channels consign it to their archival rooms.
They remind me of a heart-warming poem by the then-young (and killed only months later during WW-II) John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, who was sent to England to fly a Supermarine Spitfire with the 412 Fighter Squadron. He writes after a sortie:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Here is a tribute to all brave-hearts who have touched the face of God. May we never forget their sacrifices.
