Photo realism

Some very unsettling photographs have surfaced after an anti-Naxal operation in West Midnapore,showing security forces carrying back enemy corpses like dead meat. The home ministry has expressed its unhappiness over the animal-like way in which the bodies of men and women were carried,strung up on bamboo poles.

The home ministry said it was unclear whether it was CRPF men or Bengal police carrying the bodies,and whether an official photographer took the pictures,or whether many photographers were allowed. However,that is mere finessing the question is not about the photographs,but what the photographs reveal. Our moral lens has to honour the humanity of the enemy,even in a situation as extreme as this. As the ministry itself pointed out,the sense of recoil that Indians felt at the bodies of our security forces are mistreated should extend to insurgents as well. Disrespecting human death offends the laws of war and peace.

Conflict produces dead bodies,and there have been all too many on both sides as the state responds with a new ferocity to the destructive Maoist insurgency that attacks its very foundations. The Maoists justify their violence as a revolutionary intervention,one that finally puts an end to the daily crisis in which Indias tribals are plunged. However,as the security forces take them on,it is crucial to end the crude symmetry that some observers draw between the actions of the two sides. The difference between the state and the marauding Maoists needs no pointing out,but the security forces must remember,even in pitched battle situations,that they are also a repository of public trust.