The Kargil war of 1999 as Major General Ashok Mehta puts it was, “India’s first war on television”. The Kargil war had a distinctive character from previous wars fought by Indian Armed forces as it was India’s first ever confrontation with the most likely enemy Pakistan in an era marked by an all-pervasive mass media. Although the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 were also reported by the then media industry, the coverage of Kargil war was unique in the sense that it was fought in the times of booming electronic media especially after the 1991 liberalization and globalization reforms.
The Kargil Review Committee(KRC) commented on the media and public scrutiny of the war in these words“It was perhaps always so in some measure but never as much as today: wars involve entire people, not just armies. The battle is everywhere and not only on a given “front”. The communications revolution has annihilated time and space and, as we know, the Kargil action, from booming guns to the last rites of the fallen, entered the lives of millions of television viewers as a household experience”.
The Indian media left no stone unturned to mythologize the war and as the veteran journalist P.Sainath puts it “Media made the Kargil war a cult phenomenon and Indian soldiers as miracle liberating forces of modern mythology”. It was a time when Media was the harbinger of patriotism to the whole country and during the war, most reputed media outlets coded the content and semantics to influence directly and indirectly the people’s attitude towards the war. That it does not necessarily indicate a great professional show by the media is proved by the following observation of the KRC Report: “In some ways, the ‘war’ story wrote itself and it was no surprise that some reporters were taken in by gossip which was not always edited out.”It is thus imperative to understand why Kargil war which happened almost twenty years ago still holds relevance in media space and continues to be investigated.
Even though actual parallels can never be drawn, but there are uncanny similarities between the events that happened in 1999 and which are happening now. And both the times the ruling party at the center has been Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP). Times and again the BJP has used hyper, saffron-clad nationalism as a shield to hide its shortcomings and pitfalls in the office. The ruling party today is continuously introducing new parameters to judge the patriotism of its citizens according to the scales made by top echelons of RSS-BJP leadership.
Praveen Swami in his book “The Kargil War” argues that both the origin of the Kargil war and the mystification of Pokharan II tests were executed in a desperate search for a mandate by a government perennially on the brink of collapse on account of its rickety coalition, economic mismanagement, and poor governance. Kargil has emerged as a central motif in the ultra-nationalistic polemic which now dominates official discourses in both India and Pakistan, a discourse which has been rarely questioned by an often pliant and uncritical press.
The incompetence of the Government to handle the Kargil war can be gauged by the fact that the first top cabinet meeting regarding the hostilities in Kargil was called on May 25 1999, after Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir requested the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee to take the Kargil issue seriously. After this meeting only, it was realized that there is a ‘warlike’ situation in Kargil and by this time more than fifty soldiers had lost their lives. Perhaps the sole innovative operation of the BJP during the Kargil war was the war’s reinvention as a political enterprise. The government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his decision to deliver an election speech from a platform decorated with the portraits of the three service chiefs of Indian Armed forces was a glaring example of how BJP led National Democratic Alliance used the Kargil war very skilfully in the Lok Sabha elections of 1999 for its own political benefit.
Jai Janak Raj in his 1999 book “Should Kargil be an election issue” highlighted that the BJP incorporated the spirit of Kargil in its election campaigns. The tasteless and factually incorrect party ads appropriated all the martyrdom of Indian soldiers along with the effective drumming up of a nationalist sentiment all over the country. The use of media to evoke patriotism with all the requisite films and music, point to a sustained campaign to build a mood of intense patriotism which only worked to the advantage of the incumbent government. Much of the Indian media had little to say about this abuse of power for political purposes and about the Union Government’s incompetent management of the war. Most of the Media did not even seek to understand, let alone analyze the disquieting legacies of Kargil for India.
The soap opera patriotism and forceful suppression of dissent, a culture sparked off by the Kargil war continues till today with a deeper degree of intensity and a lesser degree of impunity. In the current scenario, BJP used demonetization and surgical strikes in Uri by Indian Special Forces as the key planks of the electoral campaign in the five poll-bound states in 2018. The Party’s national executive referred to the strikes as out of the box and in consonance with its zero tolerance to terror policy. In Goa and elsewhere, defense minister Manohar Parrikar was credited with planning and conducting the surgical strikes, which he attributed to his RSS training. The government quickly lavished 32 awards for personnel of 4 and 9 Para Special Forces who carried out the strikes, making it the most highly decorated single operation in the history of the Indian army. Soon after the strikes, Parrikar attended a party rally at Lucknow where banners and posters carrying the pictures of director-general of military operations Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh, the public face of the surgical strikes, surrounded by posters of Modi, Shah, and Parrikar were seen.
In the case of surgical strikes in Uri, what was supposed to be an important covert military Operation suddenly found itself morphed into a political tool. The loud and blatant jingoism on TV news channels did little to help the situation. Some TV anchors appeared to wage a war across the LoC from their air-conditioned studios. Often, they appointed themselves as new age icons of patriotism and nationalistic ideals. The media that is supposed to be a dispassionate and neutral observer started increasingly using words like ‘martyred’ instead of ‘killed’ for soldiers in
its reports and often fabricated ‘stories’ that weren’t true.
The pattern is evidently similar to the one followed during the Kargil war. In the rule of the current regime, there has been militarization of everyday life such that it has become impossible to make a public comment that might be directed at differentiating between situations of war and those of peace. Every comment on national issues that seek to move beyond militaristic argument is seen as an attack to national honor and a call to arms. We as individuals are no longer allowed to think and speak beyond metaphors of war. Shiv Visvanathan puts the condition of Indian state today very aptly in his The Hindu article.‘This vigilantism of patriotic and chauvinist groups has the seal of official approval. A good citizen is not only someone who is corseted in a dress but one who wears a corseted mind.
Majoritarian nationalism creates a new kind of thought policing where the deviant, the dissenting, the marginal and the minority find it difficult to fit into the chorus of the nation-state. Anyone who differs from becomes anti-national. Any sign of the difference is confronted by the mob and the lynch squad. Thanks to this arid mentality of nationalism that this twisted idea of democracy has become a threat to the democratic way of life itself. Since the BJP has come to power in 2014, the nationalism debate in India has been dominated by ‘Hindutva’ politics. And it has become essential to identify a relatable enemy i.e. “Pakistan” and Muslims are either required to play along with the rules or go to Pakistan. Government is trying to manipulate the ‘Idea of India’, which is fabricated on hyper-nationalistic ambitions. The Central government is also trying to encroach upon the Open University spaces through its dirty politics. It was reported that the students’ wing of the BJP forcibly set up a Kargil “memorial” on the University of Hyderabad campus, which was subsequently demolished by varsity authorities. That it was a political move, and not really motivated by any solemn goal of commemorating the Kargil sacrifices, is evident from the fact that it was set up near a memorial for Rohit Vemula, a Dalit student who committed suicide in January 2016. It is ironical that elements close to the BJP are using Kargil in their cultural wars against liberalism.
The NDA Government is also seriously pursuing its long-held interest of rewriting histories of all wars and major operations undertaken by Indian armed forces with an innocent aim to make them simple and reader-friendly. From the huge contribution of Indian soldiers in the bloody trench-to-trench warfare of World War, I to their sheer grit in dislodging Pakistani soldiers from the icy heights of Kargil in 1999, a broad plan with deadlines has been evolved
for the release of various war histories, telefilms, comic books and the like by 2020-2022. The Government is, in its all capacities trying to convert every individual into a noncritical, compliant citizen of the state and mainstream Indian media has done little to oppose it.
Little or no effort was made to bring out the fact that the common people in both countries had no stake in the war and that Kargil was simply reinforcing the fundamentalist forces on both sides of the border. The victory in Kargil was the media’s victory to have won the consensus of the Indian citizens on the nationalist discourse through brilliant propagation of questionable information. It was the victory of the then BJP government to exploit the war success to ensure its electoral success to bring itself to power again. It was the victory of the jingoistic nationalism. Critical analysis and discourse were the losers. Soldiers didn’t win the war they fought and died. It wasn’t their war. It was the nation’s war and the nation took it away when they won it. Kargil War’s history was written by the Indian Government and the Indian media. It is the classic case of how consent is manufactured by the media. Till date, it is considered to be the greatest battle ever fought by Indian army and the soldiers who died in the war, like Param Vir Chakra(PVC) Capt. Vikram Batra and PVC Capt. Manoj Pandey have become part of the Indian Army folklore and immortal for the times immemorial.
The Kargil War and its plain single sided narrative are still intact and secure in its place. It is also significant to understand that the construction of post-Kargil patriotism was executed not only through state policy, but through cinema, television, the print media, and icons of popular culture. The media’s lack of critical insight into or investigation of the process that drove the Kargil war illustrates how this consensus has been manufactured. Articles, every year are still published on the exploits of Kargil war and its greatness on the occasion of Vijay divas which is celebrated as the day when India won the Kargil war.
Media mythologized the war then and is still continuing today. It is pathetic to see that the “spread Jingoism” policy which surfaced during Kargil war is taking shape again which is evident by current happenings in the country. The projection of the Indian Army after the Uri attacks and the surgical strikes carried by it in LOC are a glaring example of how media is inciting the public against Pakistan. As Amit Baruah in his journal, The Fourth Party pointed out: the larger point here is this – whether reporting Mumbai or Lahore – the media cannot simply be jingoistic. If fingers are to be pointed, they should be pointed with some facts in hand, not by empty rhetoric. For us citizens to fail to critically engage and question the fabricated fables of the war and its lessons for us will be a grave insult to all the soldiers who got killed in the war.