The Difficulty of Being Good by Das Gurcharan

Author:Das, Gurcharan [Das, Gurcharan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

The war convention

The detailed code of warfare elaborated in the epic places the men of the Mahabharata closer to the chivalric knights of the Western middle ages. They were aristocratic warriors, who had a sense of themselves as men of a certain kind, engaged in an activity that was of moral value. They were noble kshatriyas, not mere mercenaries, ruffians and bandits. They were also different from soldiers in modern national armies who fight and die in anonymity. Yet their concerns about the just war convention are the same as ours.

Shakespeare’s much-admired hero Henry V faced a similar problem as the Pandavas, although he seems to have had fewer moral qualms. Like Yudhishthira, Henry had to decide whether to go to war with France in order to enforce his claim to the throne. In the first scene of Act IV, Henry warns the French governor of Harfleur that if the city does not surrender, he will not be able to restrain his soldiers, who will rape virgins and impale infants upon their pikes. The guilt for this, he suggests, will be on the head of the governor for not surrendering. The audience finds this disturbing for it is clearly wrong that soldiers should inevitably kill innocent women and children. Yet, Shakespeare seems to think otherwise, for he regards Henry a noble and just king in his play. He assumes (probably rightly) that war will bring rape and murder of the innocent. It does not occur to him that these are crimes even in war. Like most of us, he did not have a high opinion of the efficacy of war conventions.

Henry’s argument sounds similar to those of modern leaders, who also do not give much thought to their responsibility for the deaths of civilians in the wars that they prosecute. When George W. Bush launched the American attack on Iraq in 2003, he must have known that many innocent Iraqis would be killed by American bombs. But he does not appear to have given it much attention. Thousands of civilians had died from American bombardments and from the civil strife that followed. President Bush did not intend to kill Iraqi civilians, but this does not absolve him of responsibility for their deaths.

When Amnesty International claimed in 2005 that the United States had been complicit in the torture and detention of the suspects of terrorism in secret locations around the world, there was outrage in America and abroad. Amnesty claimed that Yemeni men had been tortured in Jordan, and then kept for eighteen months in secret detention. The Washington Post ran a detailed account of the violent and protracted interrogation—ending in death—of a former Iraqi general. When the US collected prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, it did have a choice to treat them as criminals, which means they had a right to be represented and to face a court, or to treat them as prisoners of war. America set up military tribunals, but many Americans were suspicious about this move for those courts did not provide enough protection to prisoners.

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