Why do Indian reactions to wars fought after Independence swing between drumbeating and amnesia?
“War we do not want, freedom we will always defend,” announces the stately voice of Alyque Padamsee at the end of The Capture of Haji Pir Pass, a short documentary made by the government's Films Division in 1968. The film starts with a shot of trees, blurred by a speeding camera, ringing with war cries and gunfire. Soldiers prepare for battle, troops move up a mountainside, men fire from behind a screen of leaves, bombs streak the sky. And then the planting of a flag.
Grateful local people of the newly acquired territory speak of hardships under “Pakistani occupation” and how life had improved after the Indians arrived. At times there are images of death. A helmet rolling down a slope, a boot washed by a mountain stream, an unstirring foot – these speak of the fallen soldiers. Corpses laid out in front of a crowd like trophies – these are the slain infiltrators.
The India-Pakistan war of 1965 lives on in Indian memory as a triumph of the patriotic spirit, of good (India) over evil (Pakistan). As we mourn the suffering of Indian troops, we keep a jubilant tally of losses on the Pakistani side. In these years, Indian public memory has been unassailed by doubts over where freedom and justice belong.
It is in the same festive vein that the Indian government is holding a “commemorative carnival” to mark the war’s 50th anniversary. Starting on August 28, the day Indian troops captured the Haji Pir Pass, the celebrations will include “mock displays” of operations as well as the release of a stamp and a book on the war, before culminating in a massed band concert.
Triumphalism or amnesia
Certain questions may be asked. Will the re-enacted operations include reverses faced by Indian troops early in the war? Will the ceremonies acknowledge that Pakistan commemorates September 6 as “Defence Day”, when its forces warded off an Indian advance on Lahore? Will it be remembered that the border disputes of 1965 were never really resolved? Perhaps not, because that might dampen the festivities.
Why must Indian reactions to wars fought after Independence swing between triumphalism and amnesia?
First, because public memory of these wars is circumscribed by the secrets that surround them. December 16, the day the Bangladesh War of 1971 ended, is commemorated as Vijay Diwas. Yet most of the military records of 1971 are believed to have been shredded soon after the fighting. While the 1965 war is being celebrated, documents on it, reportedly lying with the ministry of defence, the external affairs ministry, the air force and the army, are yet to be declassified. These documents, it is felt, would shed light on military decisions and indecisions, perhaps changing the story of the conflict. In the absence of information, memory can yield to rhetoric and the official stories that emerge are invariably those of victory.
Second, because national pride is still linked to victory in war, to the primeval notion that a state must validate itself through military prowess. Defeat is always spoken of as humiliation and the repressed memories of 1962 continue to haunt. The government is still reluctant to declassify the Henderson-Brooks report, though by all accounts, its contents are an open secret – that India lost the war with China because of blunders in leadership. Perhaps it fears that releasing the report will turn rumours into inescapable fact. In the early years of Independence, a nation coming into its own after centuries of colonisation might have relied on military victories to recuperate its sense of self and build up a new, heroic history. Those early insecurities seem to live on in unshadowed tales of triumph.
Memorialisation of war
Our fraught relationship with memory is perhaps best embodied in the absence of a national war memorial. An idea first proposed in the 1960s and periodically resurrected, it was finally allotted budgetary funds in 2014 and is supposed to come up in the India Gate complex. But how should we choose to remember war? Most of us will never know what it was like to have shouted war cries on that cold hillside in 1965, to have got news of a relative killed in action, to have waited in fear as advancing armies closed in. That particular memory of the war will live and die with those who experienced it. But how do we, collectively, remember?
Traditionally, institutional memory has stuck to heroic histories of war. As writer Susan Sontag says, “If governments had their way, war photography, like most war poetry, would drum up support for soldiers’ sacrifice. Indeed, war photography begins with such a mission, such a disgrace.” The photographer who took pictures of the Crimean War, for instance, was sent at Prince Albert’s instance, to counter traumatic stories of the conditions faced by soldiers. The devastating wars of the 20th century and the increase in media coverage have disrupted such histories, made governments more circumspect.
The United States, trying to come to terms with Vietnam, chose a sombre monument. An arrow-shaped wall of black granite stretches across a park in Washington DC, pointing towards the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, as if acknowledging older wars and older ways of remembering. The names of more than 58,000 war veterans are etched into the wall. Architect Maya Lin, describing her first visit to the park where the monument was located, said, “I wanted to cut into the earth.” The memorial was to be a scar, she said, which healed over time but still remained, replicating the process of memory itself.
A war is a violent, traumatic episode in a nation’s history. Legends of victory cannot elide that fact. The act of causing death can damage the collective psyche as much as suffering losses can. Memorialisations of war need to embody this wounded, human memory. It can heal if it can mourn. Memorialisation can help this process, first by recognising the hurt, then by grieving for the dead, all the dead. For nobody wins a war.
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