An Open Letter to the PM of India

How long will you go on giving employment to the kin of the martyrs?

Your Excellency Shri Narendra Modi ji
The Honorable Prime Minster of India.

Sir,

India has lost her another brave son while on duty at the border with Pakistan. How many more will lay down their lives in the line of duty? This is not my question but this is the question of many, many Indians.

Has any political leader ever lost his/her soldier son on the border since India saw the light of the day in 1947? If not, why do only the ordinary people of India suffer this loss?

I feel it is so because they don’t have any ‘better’ options, unfortunately. Had they have `better` options, they would have sent their sons to the other fields as every political leader does. I wish they too had options to send their sons to bureaucracy.

Have you, Your Excellency, ever realized that to join army is the last resort left for the brave sons of India? No, you might not have realized it because you don`t have time for it.

The problem of Jammu and Kashmir is not new, everybody knows. The nation has spent 70+ years martyring its ‘brave sons’ to get what? A feeling of being proud of having the dead bodies of its sons wrapped in the great tricolor? A job for the next of the kin of the martyred? A petrol pump or a piece of land for the widow of the slain soldier? What else?

Will the government and the words spoken at the time of the funeral of the slain soldiers bring back the smiles of the old parents, the young wife and the orphaned kids? Will they ever realize their dreams?

Do you also, as did the past heads of the governments of India, have no solution to this problem? Do you think at all it is a problem? After every death at the border we listen to the same foolish statements that have really lost their meanings and people have started lending a deaf ear to them. Will you agree sir? Never, I think. Don’t, Mr Prime Minister, you don’t need to.

I understand you have many, many more important issues at your table. You have to save cows. You have to make people avoid eating beef. You have to make India a more secular state than it is today. You have to bring back the black money deposited in the foreign banks. You have to bring ‘good days’ for the people of India. You have to bring India at the top of the world economic map. You have to talk to the nation every month over the radio.

Will you please ever plan, Mr Prime Minister, to talk to the wife or the parents or the sons and daughters of every martyred soldier? Do it once a month please, as you do ‘Man ki Baat’, it’s a humble suggestion to you from nobody.

I may agree Pakistan is not ready to cooperate. I may agree people of Jammu and Kashmir are not ready to converse. I may agree you want it solved bilaterally. I may agree you don’t want a third party involvement.

I will not, certainly not, agree that the problem persists still 70 more years. What is the solution of this problem? Who better knows it than you do sir?

How long will you go on giving jobs to the next of the kin of the martyred soldiers? Do you want to test the patience of the helpless parents who send their sons to the army for their livelihood and receive their coffins instead? If yes, then go on, the great people of India will not be defeated, never.

Also, they don’t want to see their sons wrapped in the tricolor. They want to see them saluting it. Yes.

-Rishi Nagar.
July 19, 2017.