Mercenaries of today

People in army and agencies do exactly what mercenaries have done, with the difference that believe they have a cause.

The history that I read in school had a good dose of battles, wars, empire-building and such things. Avenging one’s sister’s slighting, avenging the killing of a father, avenging one’s own usurpation from the throne and similar personal grievances of the royals were often presented as prominent reasons for war between kings. The thought that often occurred to me in my childhood was about the people who constituted the armies that fought these bloody battles. I can understand ties of caste, clan, religion and such but for kingdoms and their armies that encompassed more than one such category (and most did), what was in it for most of the fighting men? Why would they march and fight because some big guy had been miffed by the actions of some other big guy? They held no personal grudge either way. The part-time soldiers knew that they were mercenaries. That made them professionals. The “give” and “take” was well-defined — the professionals knew what mattered most were their own lives. That is precisely why certain things were quite common. Mutinies were common. Desertion was even more common. The subcontinent has produced countless such mercenaries. We now like to think of many of them as veers and ghazis. The “cause” of fighting was, more often than not, as irrelevant to the armed man as the “prestige” of a five-star hotel is to an underpaid bathroom-cleaner.

With the rise of nation-states and ideologies of nationalism, we now have an unprecedented phenomenon that has been sweeping the world, particularly for the last couple of centuries — the permanent standing armies and agencies for dealing with “external threats” of nation-states. There are hordes of young people signed up in the army and other agencies, doing exactly what mercenaries of various hues have done in the past, with a crucial difference. Many of them vaguely think they have a cause (“the nation”, its “security” and “prestige”), which is better than the “cause” of his opposing party, and that they do what they do not only for material benefits. In short, they do not think of themselves as mercenaries. So much so that now, the term “mercenary” has become a nasty word. Now, it is generally associated, quite tellingly, with “weak” states or “non-state” actors — in short, entities that do not have a strong “nation-state” ideology.

There is something greater that the employer and the employee (the mercenaries) are both a part of, where the vertical employer/employee dichotomy vanishes and they stand side by side, as equals. This something is the nation and it is held together by nationalism — the king of “glues”. Sarabjit Singh and Surjeet Singh were neck deep in the glue. The former is dead. “Tactical kindness” from the state of Pakistan has saved the latter. The state of India denies their claims of working for it — certifying them as free actors. The state of Pakistan ascribes free agency to its nationals who get caught or killed across the LoC and deny any connection. The mythical glue produced by the anthem, jhanda and the danda, seems to lose potency during these times. Who endangered Sarabjit Singh’s life the most? Do we have anything to fear from those who endangered Sarabjit’s life the most (and the Sarabjits in jails and under cover on both sides of the Radcliffe line)? Sanaullah has been killed, too. People who did not know his name when he lived will now make him a martyr. Others will try to show why this was not a retaliation, or how Sanaullah’s death was less brutal than Sarabjit’s. In this nitpicking about the level of brutality and the arrow of causality, what gets brutalised is the dignity of human beings, who have rights that predate nations and nationalisms. A few lines from the Punjabi poet Avtar Singh Paash — killed by Khalistani militants — may have clues. Translated, it says:

If a life without conscience is a precondition of the country’s security, if anything other than saying ‘yes’ in agreement is obscene, and the mind submits before the greedy times, then the security of the country is a danger to us.

Surely, anyone is free to take pride in the hotel, but they should know who is expendable, irrespective of their depth of pride.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2013.