For all those who want a war

                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                @borpu2

A disclaimer first: I love my country as much as anyone who is likely to read this piece. I am a proud Indian too!

Having opened my heart out, probably to preempt any knee-jerk reactions from over-enthusiastic ‘patriots’, I address this piece to those who have been either openly advocating, or secretly hoping for, an all-out war to start between the neighbors.

The other day I tuned to one of the many 24 by 7 news channels, a mistake that I usually avoid like a plague these days, and saw the familiar anchor in his all-too-familiar act of shouting, stroking his own hair in anger and spewing invective at one of the panelists as well as on a sovereign country, all under a severe ‘I-am-more-patriot-than-you’ spell. Such wannabe opinion leaders insist that we must ‘decimate’ our neighbor, we need to ‘teach them a lesson’, ‘now-or-never’, ‘enough is enough’ etc. etc. Last weekend, even my golf-buddy declared in between taking his strokes, ‘No, this time we must not let them off. They need to be finished. If war is required, so be it. There will be deaths, but that’s what they have signed for!’

Wait a second! Are they seriously advocating an all-out war between two nuclear-armed nations? That too with one whose military strength is not comparable to ours unless one includes the nuclear option in the equation, and one that, for the same reason, refuses to endorse a no-first use doctrine for nuclear arms. The war enthusiasts think that the threat of using nuclear arms is a hoax. It could be true. After all, there shall be no winner in a nuclear war. But, can we rule it out completely?

Let’s assume our adversary shall not be foolish to use the disastrous option, even if pushed to the corner. That’s a fair assumption. But, what are the likely costs of a conventional war? We just have to look at some of the statistics. They are widely available all over the cyberspace. It suffices here to say that a war leaves a sick trail of deaths and destruction, a big hole in the economy, and takes a country back in time through inconceivable collateral damages to its infrastructure.

And ‘decimate’ a neighboring sovereign country! Let’s not forget that a common man there is no different than ours, working his days just for an honorable survival with a happy family. Carpet bombing is not the solution to kill rats. 

We are not the only neighbors in the world who are at loggerheads, unfortunately. Point at any region of the globe at random, chances are that one would find a region where the neighbors are fighting a physical, economical or psychological war. Georgia and Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Sudan and South Sudan, Ukraine and Russia, Greece and Marcedonia, Syria and Turkey, the list goes on. A few of these, as well as others elsewhere in the world, have tried to find a solution by waging wars, presumably championed by hawks like ours in those countries. After years of fighting, after causing severe damages to their already fragile economies, and post loss of thousands of lives, none of the issues have been solved. 

War should be, and must be, the absolute last option. We are not there yet. We should not make war cries from the comforts of those air-conditioned studios. Neither should we be reckless advocates of wars while enjoying our privileged lives. We have elected a government to take the right decisions to defend the interests of our country. Let us trust them with it. Building up pressure on them through engineered public opinion would do no good.