Remembering 1965, forgetting 1965, celebrating 1965

By Garga Chatterjee

We, the citizens of the Indian Union, cannot afford to forget the year 1965. The world we live in was shaped in no small way by events of that year, though not necessarily by the events that the Government of the Indian Union would want us to remember but by those events that it wants us to forget. The Government of the Indian Union is celebrating the 1965 war with pomp and grandeur. While celebrating a war that noone claims was fought for national liberation, human rights or any positive human value, funds have already been pumped in for commemoration.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the war of 1965, where the primary combatants were the Indian Union`s Army and Pakistan`s Army. According to sources that don`t owe explicit affiliation to the propaganda machines of Pakistan or the Indian Union, about 7800 army men were killed in the war. Of this number, about 3000 were from the Indian Union`s Army and the rest from Pakistan Army. Given that there was no `crowning` event like surrender and that both groups of combatants inflicted somewhat similar amount of damage to each other and also gained large swathes of each other`s territories, the answer to the question `who won?` was up for grabs. That opportunity was grabbed with a lot of zeal by the respective governments to tutor their citizens and especially the yeet-to-be-born citizen about their version of who were the good guys, who were the bad guys, who won, who lost and how in all of this we must never ask questions like the difference in caste-class composition of those the jawans and the officers, how many lives of these poor regions of the world could be protected from death by disease and malnutrition compared to the number of lives that were purportedly protected by the war using the same amount of money that was spent in the war and most importantly, did the likelihood of being killed, tortured, assaulted, mistreated or raped by one`s `own` army personnel compared to alien army personnel decrease after this war. It remains an undeniable truth that a citizen of Pakistan is much more likely to be killed, tortured, assaulted, mistreated, subjected to forced laour, kidnapped, `disappeared`, looted or raped in his or her lifetime by the Pakistan Army than the Indian Union Army. This was true then and this is true now. Whether the reverse holds true for a citizen of the Indian Union is something I don`t have the courage to comment upon. I am not a very courageous man. I am a fat, short, rice-eating Bengali after all.

Another spate of killings also happened in 1965. And it was one-sided murder of the unarmed. Hundreds of Tamil young men were killed brutally by Khaki armed forces in what is now called Tamil Nadu. This was no minor affair and was reported extensively for many days across the world, in the NewYork Times, Chicago Tribune, Time magazine and elsewhere. The Indian Union government rushed in its Khaki forces to suppress the unprecedented mass movement of Tamil youths against the planned imposition of Hindi as the Indian Union`s sole official language. The martyred youth of 1965 represent another narrative of glory and bravery, that is drowned down by tricolour drumbeats. But those who remember can never forget. While the Indian Union government today is making the push for Hindi as UN language, it dare not mention these language martyrs on the 50th anniversary of their martyrdom. There cause lingers through the recent Chennai declaration of language rights that asks for linguistic equality for all our mother-tongues `“ a call that is slowly gathering steam. At a solemn event held in Chennai, representatives from Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala paid homage to these martyrs as their own, to the 1965 Tamil cause as their own. The 1965 language movement of Tamils stopped the advancing battle-tank of Hindi imposition. The momentum of Hindi imposition was broken by the Tamil speed-breaker, if only temporarily. The tank that was stopped in its track is restarting its engine with renewed vigour. After the 1965 language movement, the Congress, which had ruled Tamil Nadu till then was defeated for good – never to return again. That should give us an idea what those events and killings meant and their continued reverberations in people`s memory. Its due to these events that complete Hindi imposition on non-Hindi people remains only a partially succesful project. Whether that can be compared to the relevance of 1965 war in people`s lives is something I leave the readers to judge.

50 years after 1965, we must probe why does Delhi want us to celebrate one 1965 and forget another? All nation-state narratives, curated by the government, to create `truth` and `common-sense`, remembers and celebrates certain things and forgets others. It underlines certain things and deletes other things. A comparison of the highlighted with the deleted gives us an idea of who the nation-state is for and who it is not for, who is boss and who is servant. This government narrative gains currency through dominant film-industry, media academia and textbooks and can be be called the autobiography of a nation-state. But no nation-state in the world is one people. All people must write their own autobiographies. They owe it to their martyrs and their children. They owe it to smoke rising from burned wigwams of the native Americans, the smoke that was seen by the people made alien in their own homeland by other people by superiority of arms and numbers, the smoke that rose above disinformation and indoctrination to spread on the wide canvas of the unconquerred starry sky and broke into words that could be seen from far-far-away, words that solemnly whisper in every mother-tongue of this earth that `We shall not forget`. We cannot forget 1965.