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A PAKISTANI friend was speechless as we approached a crowded traffic signal off Delhi’s Khan Market, and surprised me with her look of disbelief. What she had just seen with awe was an everyday occurrence for ordinary Indians: an army brigadier in his chauffeur-driven black Ambassador had stopped behind other cars. As the light went green the vigorously polished car flashed the indicator and turned carefully on to Humayun Road.
The sight of a military officer respecting a traffic light surprised the friend from Pakistan but there was another issue for me. In her country, ordinary people can tell a colonel from a brigadier by their uniform. Indians mostly would fail to divine a general from a colonel from whatever stripes or stars that adorn the epaulette. It must be because of the exposure to the army in their daily lives that Pakistanis seem more adept than Indians in discerning the fine distinctions that define the military. By contrast, unless something changes as Fahmida Riaz sees it happening, Indians are more adept at guessing the social status of a person from the way the turban is worn or the sari draped.
To be polite, I took a lenient view of why it was not a norm in my friend’s country for many senior army officers to stop at a traffic light. It had to do with Frankenstein’s monsters, I surmised, one they had created with the misuse of religion in politics. One of their generals had survived two assassination attempts, once on the road from the military HQ. Another general was not so lucky, reason enough for folks in the army to be cautious, I posited.
In India’s neighbourhood the true blue heirs of the colonial order had voluntarily become repositories of religion and nationhood.
The friend took the view, not unusual among journalists and scholars in her country, that the army there was only flaunting its unusual influence. Somehow, not stopping at traffic lights was a symptom of a larger malaise to her, which surfaced periodically in military takeovers or interference in critical departments that normally lie with civilian governments in a democracy. She didn’t say all of this. That’s the way I read her incoherent and shocked fulminations.
To make her feel less distraught I changed the subject to civilians who do not stop at traffic lights. I don’t know what the norm in Pakistan is but you can find many culprits among Indians, and mostly they are politicians. It’s known resentfully as India’s VIP culture. Politicians and bureaucrats lead those that flash red lights on car roofs, often with commandos tailing them, to jump traffic signals. There are other privileges, more palpable than queue jumping, which they have cornered in their service to democracy.
I asked a friend after he prematurely retired from the Indian army a few years ago, if the generals had a view about the shenanigans of politicians that most Indians and many foreigners see today as a threat to the country’s liberal resolve. The reply left me even less informed. He said the Indian army was a professional body and would not double guess a civilian government.
In other words, the Indian Express report authored by its then editor about army columns moving towards Delhi and striking fear in the civilian establishment was mere scare-mongering. That’s a relief. But the Pakistani and Bangladeshi armies were identical heirs to the British Indian army — the efficient military that crushed the 1857 uprising against colonial rule, the army which fought imperialist wars with the help of Indian men in China as elsewhere on behalf of the foreign bosses.
In India’s neighbourhood these true blue heirs of the colonial order had voluntarily become repositories of religion and nationhood. They took charge of their peoples’ destinies, to put it mildly. And without tinkering too much with the inventory in the army canteens, religion was ushered to course through the veins of the military’s nation-loving officers. Now the attempt is on to stem the rot, and one can only hope the effort succeeds.
The colonial army comprised Indian men of different faiths and regions. If an Afghan leader were to watch the Republic Day parade in Delhi, they would find that the India Gate memorial still has names etched of officers and soldiers, Sikhs and Pathans mostly, who served in colonial adventures in Afghanistan. For a nation that uses mobs to erase memories of real or imagined injustices from history, the India Gate memorial stands out as a glistening exception.
Ironies notwithstanding, both armies have a view on Afghanistan even today. Among other similarities, both apparently delight in chopping heads of rival soldiers as Indian and Pakistani journalists have claimed. This gory penchant has a colonial pedigree. Pictures of British soldiers clutching a dozen scalps in their victorious hands prove the point. The severed heads belonged to communist insurgents in Malaya. In this way and more, the subcontinental identities are joined at the hip.
Nehru gave a glimpse of his frustration that the British Indian army was split in 1947. In a letter to the Burmese leader who needed military help to fight communist insurgents, he wrote: “I know we have not been able to fulfil all your demands. I explained to you the great difficulties that we are experiencing. These difficulties flowed from the partition, which split up our army, our air force, our services, our communications and almost everything.”
Nehru’s detailed letter to his Burmese friend has left me wondering what if the army had not been split. Would we be raising and hunting the Taliban or targeting the Maoist rebels jointly? And how we would negotiate the Kashmiri dream of azadi?
With no martial pretences in the family barring a forbear in Barabanki who was hanged in the 1857 mayhem for his anti-British rebellion, my links with military have been shepherded by the romance of Sahir Ludhianvi and Sardar Jafri who opposed war.
The romance of poetry and peace seems to have become alien to a growing number of nationalists today. Such is the love of the military, in fact, that some Indian TV channels got their anchors to appear in army fatigues. As they spewed venom on peace activists from their make-believe situation rooms, my mind turned to the traffic signals, which the good soldiers still obey.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn November 8th, 2016
