A set of amateur videos, shot in Kashmir and catapulted into viral fame on Indian social media, have heightened a continuing debate about whether patriotism equals unquestioning support for New Delhi’s army.
In one series of videos from April 10, young Kashmiri men shout “India, go back!” at paramilitary soldiers after a violent by-election in Srinagar. One Kashmiri man slaps the head of a soldier walking past; another kicks a helmet that a soldier holds in his hand.
Another video, uploaded around the same date, shows a young Kashmiri civilian tied by force to the front of an army jeep as it proceeds through Budgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar. The civilian,
it appears, was intended to act as a human shield, to discourage protesters from throwing stones.
The jeep had been leading a convoy with a dozen election officials, an army source told the Hindustan Times newspaper. "It was do or die," the source said.
Over the last two weeks, these videos have increased the animosity between the critics and the nationalist supporters of prime minister Narendra Modi.
The context and authenticity of both videos has been fiercely contested by pro and anti-Modi factions.
But they have nevertheless sparked a debate on how Indians should support their army, and whether such support should be a litmus test for patriotism.
The debate is particularly vivid now, given the criticisms of the Indian army and the state in suppressing protests and revolts in Kashmir.
Eight civilians were killed by police fire during protests against the April 9 by-election, and a broad security crackdown has been in force for nearly a year, following unrest that has claimed at least a
hundred lives – both civilians and policemen – last summer.
On Twitter, the #IndianArmy hashtag has been appended to tweets that profess unquestioning support for the military.
“For every slap on my army’s [soldiers], lay down at least a 100 jihadi lives,” the cricketer Gautam Gambhir, who describes himself as a “patriot” on Twitter, wrote on April 13. “Whoever wants azadi [Kashmiri freedom] LEAVE NOW! Kashmir is ours.”
Several Twitter accounts said tying the civilian to the army jeep was justifiable. Although the army has ordered an investigation into the incident, to be completed by May 15, military sources defended it to the media.
“Everything is fair in love and war,” Ram Madhav, the general secretary of Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told The Hindu newspaper. Of the unnamed army major who ordered the move, Mr Madhav said, “I will compliment him for the decision that he took. He saved the lives of the people in police station, officials and all, and also his own boys.”
This line of thinking is common among fervent nationalists, said Srinath Raghavan, a military historian who once served as an infantry officer in the Indian army.
“The main claim of most types of nationalism is that the nation is the highest political value,” Mr Raghavan told The National. Since the military is the ultimate defender of the nation-state and what the state proclaims as its territory, defending the army becomes synonymous with patriotism itself, he said.
The nationalist debate has settled now on the army, in relation to Kashmir, because retaining Kashmir within the Indian union has been central to the BJP’s politics, and because of the party’s growing
electoral successes across India, Mr Raghavan said.
Just last month, the BJP swept into power in Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous state and one it had struggled in for decades.
“If the issue has gained wider traction in India, it is because of the deepening ideological hold of the BJP on the country,” Mr Raghavan said. “This is what ‘hegemony’ feels like.”
Mr Modi’s government and his supporters also want to associate themselves with the army as an institution and “benefit from that appropriation”, said Sushant Singh, a New Delhi-based analyst and a
former lieutenant-colonel in the army.
“Right-wing forces want to appropriate the army’s actions as one undertaken for their cause,” he said. “They can thus closely identify themselves with the army and take political advantage of the respect
and support that the army has among the Indians.”
Both Mr Raghavan and Mr Singh stressed the dangers of equating patriotism with support for the army, pointing to Pakistan as a cautionary example of – in Mr Raghavan’s words – “treating the
military as the unquestionable guardian of the country’s interests”.
He added, “Refusing to subject the army’s actions to critical scrutiny is an abdication of our democratic responsibility as citizens. The chain of accountability in a democracy is clear: the army is
responsible to the political leadership, which in turn is responsible to the people. Muting legitimate criticism of the military is a slippery slope for democracies.”
Ironically, the act of placing the army above reproach can distort and diminish the very integrity of the institution, Mr Singh said.
“There is a danger for the army itself because it can stop improving if it starts buying the public narrative of its infallibility.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
