One of the biggest lessons from the bitterness caused by the use of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in recent times is that not everything is fair in war or love. We hope this lesson has registered amongst those who have chosen to use this devastating and obnoxiously unethical weapon. The best possible option would be for peace to return, but otherwise, those in the war must be compelled to desist from doing or using anything that would cause civilian casualties. In an age, when even state-of-the-art GPS guided smart bombs, and other precision new generation weapons such as unmanned drones, are blasted for not being smart enough, IEDs are really dumb bombs exploding on anybody, even cattle and livestock. In all fairness, the original intents of these IEDs probably would have been meant to deter the advances of opponents, but the hard fact is, they become loose cannons, causing more civilian casualties than combatants. We cannot help recall again a lecture by Prof. Charles Douglas Lummis in Imphal on the “
Right of Belligerence” where he said the casualties of war are almost always overwhelmingly civilians. “Only a soldier knows how difficult it is to kill another soldier” he said, adding that it is civilians who by and large know little or nothing about how not to die or get injured in a war, therefore also are more likely to end up as casualties.
The charge from many different quarters that the menace is not so much of IEDs but of anti-personnel landmines needs serious investigation. The intent of the use of both may be the same, but there would be a world of difference between their menace values. If these are indeed anti-personnel landmines, the script of the story would also probably change considerably. Not so much because it would put those using these explosives in a much worse light (indiscriminate nature of IED is equally bad spiritually, although cannot acquire the magnitude of destructiveness of the former), but because the next logical question would be, which ordnance factory these were manufactured. Whether they are foreign or Indian? India incidentally is still to sign the international protocol seeking their total disuse, so probably would still be manufacturing them for use along its hostile international borders. As far as we remember it, a number of these explosives in Manipur were detected before explosion so their manufacturers cannot be under any dispute. Again, as far as we remember the reports from the Army and the police involved in defusing them, they were all IEDs without even a single exception. But maybe further investigation is what is called for now.
Whatever the case may be, the dumb bomb era must be forced closed. They have taken enough innocent blood and have petrified enough villages. The government must without delay clean up the areas where IEDs are likely to be and liberate the minds of these villagers from the uncertainty. The insurgent groups who might still have these weapons in their arsenal must understand they would be seeking their own doom if they continue using them. It is not just their enemies, but the entire neutral world abhors these incidents of bomb blasts. It is surprising that none of those who possess these weapons learnt the lesson in the 1990s when in the wake of a series of IED blasts in various marketplaces of Imphal, especially the devastating one outside the Gandhi Avenue, State Bank of India, SBI, building where security vehicles normally park, the popular Manipuri pop singer “Tapta” mocked the sorry episode in his widely popular song “Bazar-da dong dong dong dong pokhaire”.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam