Does Anyone Care For Our Martyr Soldiers?

“Does anyone care” ~ These three words would be interpreted differently by different people. What is this ‘care’ that we are talking about?

Did it pain that Indian soldiers died? Yes, I was hurt. A lot of Indians were hurt. They felt bad. Many felt angry. Many abused Pakistan. Many asked PM Modi about his 56″ chest. Many wanted India to give a befitting reply.

But is this really care? Why did soldiers die? Who or what killed them? Bullets of terrorists, or the bad policy of India, or the proxy war of Pakistan, or bad training, or lack of proper equipment?

Did we seek answers to these questions?

I once met an old lady while traveling in a train. She was a widow. While chatting she told me that her husband was working in a department which deals with approving the clothes for soldiers who are deployed in Siachen. He had to ensure that the clothes are of good quality, in fact, the best quality as the conditions in Siachen are severely harsh.

She told me that because he refused to approve clothes of inferior quality, his promotion got stuck for 10 years. Who had this much power to stop his promotion? Who wanted to make profits by selling clothes of inferior quality to the army? How many Indian soldiers might have died in Siachen because of inferior quality clothes?

Do we care?

When an American soldier dies, it becomes a world news. Although many assume that because a solider of a superpower has died, it would have a deep political impact, however, I see it differently. It is very hard to kill an American soldier. Not only they are trained very well, they also have the best of the equipment, the best gadgets. America does care about his soldiers more than we do.

Does it ever make you wonder why the circumstances in which an Indian soldier dies are never made public? We just get to hear that a bullet killed him. How could a bullet reach him in the first place? And a bullet reaching a Lt Colonel is actually a failure at many levels. Did we ever care to understand what really happened? There was a definite failure in reconnaissance. I am not putting the blame on the army, rather on the technology that we provide them even after the cost of such technology coming down drastically.

We are emotional people and we were hurt because our guardians died. However, most of us didn’t care beyond that. We must stop thinking that Indians soldiers join the army after signing their own death warrant. They don’t.

They are not cannon fodders.
They are supposed to kill, not die.

And we are supposed to equip them so well that they don’t die.

– Rohit Nigam