CRPF:Coffins Reserved For Police Force

The photograph in the newspapers displays the bodies lined up in neat rows, like logs. Battle fatigues in shreds, faces caked with blood and the limbs of few missing. Constable Jaipal Singh, Constable Amit Kumar Singh, Constable Dharam Pal Singh, Constable Sachin Kumar... there are about seventy three of them, killed in Maoist Ambush in the Dantewada forests of Chhatisgarh. It was a neatly laid trap by the naxalites and the men in uniform seemed to have walked right into it. The end of their life story. The government's 'olive branch' approach has boomeranged. There are talks about using air power against naxalites. The political rigmarole continues as three-year-old Shivam, son of CRPF soldier Ranjit Kumar Yadav, witnesses the last rites of his father. It is Shivam and the families of the dead soldiers whom I fear for. The bread winner's gone. The memory of the common man is short and of the uncommon politicians shorter still. Seventy three dead men, mostly from lower middle-class of UP hinterland, leave behind seventy three broken families for whom sustinance alone will soon become a battle of the sorts. Leaders who didn't falter in splitting the Kargil War along party lines, are not likely to remember Shivam and his felled father in a hurry, until political expediency dictates otherwise.
I cry not for the 73 dead men but the 73 living and breathing families they have left behind in a nation which loves to bury its living with its dead.