Flashback by Urvashi Butalia

Some weeks ago I was at Delhi airport waiting to board a flight to Nepal. Seated next to me in the lounge was a group of soldiers dressed in battle fatigues. Each one wore epaulettes on his shoulders that said simply: INDIA. Both our flights were late and after a while we got talking. Where were they going, I asked them. To Africa, on a peace-keeping mission. One was from Bihar, another from Punjab and a third was from Tamil Nadu. At some point I asked them how they felt about being part of a peacekeeping force. Were they proud to be part of such an ‘honourable’ activity? Did the fact that they were representing India make them in any way feel nationalistic? Did they feel they were doing something to serve the nation? I admit that my questions were loaded. I knew what I wanted to find out. But they replied readily enough. We’re in the kind of job, they said, where you have to follow orders and we’ve been ordered to go, so we are going. They weren’t particularly happy about being sent to Africa. It was the land of ‘habshis’, it didn’t have much to offer, and who knew what fate awaited them there? (The next week I learnt that 500 Indian soldiers were trapped in Sierra Leone and wondered if my airport companions were among them).

The man from Punjab had fought in the Kargil war (1998-99) with Pakistan. “We faced very tough conditions over there,” he told me, “but even though we knew we were fighting the enemy, we didn’t really feel any sense of national honour. All we wanted was warm clothes and reasonable food, and some strategising so that we were not turned into guinea pigs for our two governments.” Instead, they said, it was their wives who felt more nationalistic back in their villages — their homes were looked upon rather differently because they were homes whose men were out fighting for the country.