Often the difference between ‘truth’ and the ‘stated’ is a tricky one. The gulf in between the two has the potential to make them seem fairly different and, at times, starkly paradoxical. And what if that gulf is deliberate and a constructed one, say in the interest of a nation? It, then, gets murkier even more. A year and a half back, on a journey to Southern India on a train, a young man serving in the Indian Army and posted in Kashmir valley’s Baramulla area was the attention of a small crowd of people including me and my friends. His tales were listened to very attentively by the neighboring passengers. We stood amazed at how these fellows listened to him as if he was drawing a plot out of a fantasy. And when he narrated how a mine blast once hit the vehicle he and his fellow countrymen were traveling in and how he alone had avoided death just by a whisker, his audience was sympathetic with him but at the same time enraged over the militants who had planted the explosive there and blasted it just in time to kill all the 35 soldiers on board.
We, being from the valley just listened to him as if it was a normal thing, for we have been brought up in this environment of death and chaos. It was not too long before we remembered that the mine blast he was talking of had happened in Baramulla in which, as per State Radio, 14 Army personnel had been killed. It turned out, in the course of time, that there had been 35 deaths and not 14 which the local station had advocated. Meanwhile, the audience in the train had an emotional outburst. They could have ripped apart the miscreants’ hearts for having caused such great disaster. However, the Army man’s tales took turns, fortunately, to beautiful things as well, like when he was offered food by an old lady who told him she had lost a son of his age in the conflict. The audience had gestures of humility on their faces. It hardly bothers a commoner whether 35 Army men have been killed or only 14. However, this brings us to the heart of the matter. An audience is always innocent and is forced to celebrate or curse a thing or an act. It is never biased unless it is forced to be so. And when it is forced to be biased, it hardly considers the truth to be truth.
A couple of months back when an American soldier Daniel Davis, having returned from Afghanistan for the second time, blew the whistle by saying publicly that America was losing the war in Afghanistan. Davis wrote a piece in a military journal highlighting how the US Army distorts the ground realities while communicating with the US Congress or the general public and how US soldiers lay their lives in capturing areas only for the local police to lose them back to Taliban. The editorial which was published after he gave a revealing interview to New York Times claims that the truth is being severely distorted by top ranking US soldiers. "Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable". Davis’ ‘version’ of the things, as expected, was disagreeable to Pentagon.
Will Davis lose his job or not, is not very hard to answer. The question that demands the answer is who forces a people to see the things otherwise? Empires engaged in wars at home or abroad, are often driven to distort the reality to further their stay in the colonies that they imperialistically hold captive. The colonial apparatus, that Sartre says makes the colonizer as well as the colonized, does not permit an Empire to report what it does to the ‘other’ people. The article claims that UN special rapporteur on torture Christof Heyns has been denied permission by India to visit Kashmir. This is because what India has been projecting to the outside world is entirely different to what is happening in the valley. It is not only with the world bodies that India has been pursuing a policy of propaganda, it is also with its own people that she is withholding information.
That is where we need to know what is truth and what stated?

(Tanveer Habib is Ph.D Student, Department of Linguistics, University of Kashmir, Srinagar. Feedback at in.tanveer@gmail.com)

Lastupdate on : Thu, 2 Aug 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 2 Aug 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 3 Aug 2012 00:00:00 IST