In Enrich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, a novel set during World War 1, towards the end the protagonist Paul Baumer, a young German soldier, gets killed on Germany’s western front on a militarily uneventful day – no combats, no heavy artillery exchanges, just a soldier falling to a routine exchange of small arms fire. The military dispatch from the western front at the end of the day, which is also the concluding line of the story, simply repeated the routine message: “all quiet on the western front”. The death of one soldier, after the millions of casualties in the course of the war, had ceased to be of any consequence. Remarque, a German veteran of the WW-I, is known for his distaste for war, and minces no word in his opinion that war makes the individual soldier insignificant and at the same time a murderer too. His character Baumer for instance, in a particularly poignant scene, stabs a French soldier to save himself and then tries frantically to save the wounded soldier he thus stabbed. Dispatches from a young American captain in Iraq, Robert Secher, (reproduced with permission in Newsweek Magazine in its November 6, 2006 issue) remarkably echo the same sentiments. Those of us in Manipur’s conflict theatre should be able to understand this from the heart. Soldiers on either side of the thin red line, the family man who is in the profession for a living, or the perfectly normal, nondescript neighbourhood boy who left home unannounced, drawn in by the lure of the revolution, are thrown into a situation where their actions come to be determined by forces outside of themselves and their wills. As Captain Secher emails his father: “…their lives are ruined, ruined by their actions which are judged by men who have never been in those situations”. In another email, he says: “…Bush should be ashamed of himself…”
Manipur is in such a terrible mess today, not just its economic and political predicaments, but also its human landscape. The war in the land is eating away at its very vitals. Human life has lost its significance. The recent official remark that it is ridiculous that the death of one person should cause the present flare-up in Moreh, reflects the same dispassionate desensitization contained in the military dispatch at the end of that uneventful day during WW-I: “all quiet on the western front”. This is not a matter of singling out anybody of being insensitive, for it has indeed become a general condition of our society today. We have all become so callous about human life. Those of us in the media cannot plead innocence either. Practically every evening, while crosschecking if any worthwhile news event has been missed out, the same dispassionate message is what is exchanged in every newsroom. Somebody shot in the leg, another killed, another beaten up, a body found… are no longer news events deserving too much attention, much less alarm. In all probability, they would make for insignificant, one paragraph, single column insertions, done simply to complete a formality, and to have a sense of relief at having not missed out any news. The following day, their newsworthiness would have already completely evaporated and nobody would even think of a follow up story, querying as to what happened thereafter, how the families took the news etc. Even if some reporters were sensitive enough to do it, his seniors may not think it important anymore, and even all in the newsroom agree against their better, consumer-driven news-senses, that it must still deserve print space, in all likelihood the readers the next morning would not agree, themselves desensitized by the ensuing war, as much as everybody else – the news reporters, the fighters in the war, the moral judges of the war, the intellectuals who rationalise the war et al. If there have been no major ambushes, no major massacres, no major encounters, no sensational kidnaps, and if there have been only a few shot in the legs, a body found, somebody intimidated, its “all quiet on the eastern front too.” When will Manipur ever return to the time when every single life mattered?
