Recommended reading for mob-groupies and chicken-hawks

Merlot Daruwala wrote:We get emotional about our soldiers, but we do not want our sons and daughters to join the army, which is now short of nearly 13,000 officers.

Merlot Daruwala wrote:On 24 July 1965, Gen. Ayub Khan and his ambitious foreign minister Z.A. Bhutto pushed their soldiers over the Line of Control into Kashmir to create trouble. India found out and on 6 September, Lal Bahadur Shastri sent the Army’s I Corps, XI Corps and XV Corps across the international border towards Lahore, ending the war.

On 3 December 1971, Gen. Yahya Khan scrambled his F-86 Sabre, F-6, Mirage III and F-104 fighter-bombers and attacked north India.
In response Indira Gandhi ordered Indian Army’s II Corps, IV Corps and XXXIII Corps into East Pakistan. They captured 90,000 Pakistanis and ended the war.

In April 1999, Gen. Pervez Musharraf sent his mountain division, the Northern Light Infantry, to occupy Indian bunkers in Dras and Kargil. But Atal Bihari Vajpayee could not counter-attack. Instead he asked the Army to retake the peaks one by one, and at great cost. The Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry, 17 Garhwal Rifles, I Bihar, 1/11 Gorkha Rifles and 70 Infantry Brigade are some of the units named by then army chief V.P. Malik in his book as heroes.

Earlier this month, Indian shelling killed a Pakistani soldier. A team of Pakistani raiders then killed two Indian soldiers, beheading one. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could not counter-attack, though a couple of days later Indian artillery killed another Pakistani, settling the score.

What has happened that India cannot punish Pakistan any longer for its insolence as it could?

Something has neutralized India’s Army, and its superiority in numbers and equipment over Pakistan. This something is the weaponization of South Asia’s nuclear programmes.

Merlot Daruwala wrote:Middle-class India now leads this life of knee-jerk rage because we hide, ignore or would rather not discuss our real infirmities, our true maladies. We get emotional about our soldiers, but we do not want our sons and daughters to join the army, which is now short of nearly 13,000 officers. We vent our fury against the Maoists and human-rights activists only when an ambush is deadly enough to make it to television news. It doesn’t bother us that 398 troopers have committed suicide since 2009; about 50 more than were killed in firefights over the same period. We are still distressed and angry about the Delhi gang rape, but we do not like to acknowledge that our fathers, uncles, brothers and friends commit almost all the 67 rapes reported in India every day.

We like to rage, and we do it from the comfort of the mob.

Some of India’s biggest problems — our tottering economy, fading agriculture, dying farmers, exploited workers, bonded labour and other modern-day slaveries, malnourished children, water scarcities and environmental ruin — do not excite the mob. In these excitable days, it is not easy to remember what is important. The media, I confess, do not help. A recent content analysis of 287 Hindi and English newspapers, done by Vipul Mudgal of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, revealed that only 2.08% of all stories dealt with issues that concern the 840 million Indians in rural areas.