It has been three days since an Indian Air Force An-32 military aircraft went missing.
It was carrying 29 personnel, six of them crew members, and eight of them family members of military personnel. There is now little hope of finding the people alive. As such it ranks amongst the biggest loss of life for our military personnel in recent months.
According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, this number is almost equal to all of the military personnel who have died in Jammu and Kashmir this year.
And yet, on Twitter, what is trending is Salman Khan. After a day on the front page of newspapers, and only some newspapers at that, this news item has disappeared.
Our blowhard TV patriots, those who are so gung-ho that they have managed to turn peaceful areas into protesting areas, have nothing to say. The same news channels, and the same newspapers, had wall-to-wall coverage of the missing Malaysian Airlines MH 370 for days, weeks even.
And do you know how many Indians were aboard that flight? Five. Just five. For some reason their lives were far more important, that tragedy was far more relevant than one that is six times as large.
This is hardly the only time such hypocrisy has been exposed. As Praveen Donthi writes in from the Valley, the same soldier who dies in Kashmir (and is lauded for it), is not even allowed a space in his own village for cremation, because he is a Dalit.
25/07/16 Omair Ahmad/Daily O
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It was carrying 29 personnel, six of them crew members, and eight of them family members of military personnel. There is now little hope of finding the people alive. As such it ranks amongst the biggest loss of life for our military personnel in recent months.
According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, this number is almost equal to all of the military personnel who have died in Jammu and Kashmir this year.
And yet, on Twitter, what is trending is Salman Khan. After a day on the front page of newspapers, and only some newspapers at that, this news item has disappeared.
Our blowhard TV patriots, those who are so gung-ho that they have managed to turn peaceful areas into protesting areas, have nothing to say. The same news channels, and the same newspapers, had wall-to-wall coverage of the missing Malaysian Airlines MH 370 for days, weeks even.
And do you know how many Indians were aboard that flight? Five. Just five. For some reason their lives were far more important, that tragedy was far more relevant than one that is six times as large.
This is hardly the only time such hypocrisy has been exposed. As Praveen Donthi writes in from the Valley, the same soldier who dies in Kashmir (and is lauded for it), is not even allowed a space in his own village for cremation, because he is a Dalit.
25/07/16 Omair Ahmad/Daily O
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