{"id":1042,"date":"2004-06-11T04:45:29","date_gmt":"2004-06-11T11:45:29","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-06-11T04:45:29","modified_gmt":"2004-06-11T11:45:29","slug":"they-feed-your-pride-with-boredom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/11\/they-feed-your-pride-with-boredom\/","title":{"rendered":"They Feed Your Pride With Boredom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=http:\/\/www.davemcnally.com\/lyrics\/TheSoftBoys\/IWannaDestroyYou.asp>And they lead you on to war<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>A Fake War in the Himalayas? <\/p>\n<p>by Ranjit Devraj <\/p>\n<p>NEW DELHI (IPS) &#8211; This week&#8217;s stunning confessions by two Indian soldiers that they helped stage fake encounters with Pakistani troops on Siachen, often called the world&#8217;s highest, coldest and costliest battlefield, has renewed calls for demilitarizing the Himalayan glacier. <\/p>\n<p>On Monday, rifleman Shyam Bahadur Thapa told a military court that he not only demolished a fake &#8220;enemy-held&#8221; objective with a rocket launcher in August 2003 but also acted the part of a Pakistani soldier killed in the action as video cameras whirred away. <\/p>\n<p>Thapa said he did this at the behest of a company commander, Maj. Surinder Singh. &#8220;He asked me to remove my jacket and cap and lie there (near the demolished objective).&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Thapa is one of four soldiers who have testified before a court of inquiry to say that they had been forced by their officers, including a colonel and two majors, to participate in fake military encounters on Siachen in August and September 2003. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Obviously this scandal involves the top brass, perhaps even generals \u2013 there is no use victimizing middle-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers,&#8221; a well-known writer on military affairs, N. Kunju, told IPS in an interview. <\/p>\n<p>Kunju, a former army man himself, is among analysts who believe that the whole Siachen conflict, now running into its 20th year, is actually a huge fraud being played on the Indian people by successive governments and one mirrored by the generals in military-dominated Pakistan.<\/ul>\n<p><a href=http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/ips\/devraj.php?articleid=2790>Read the whole thing<\/a>, but by no means ever doubt that your own government &#8212; wherever you may live &#8212; is on the up and up. Don&#8217;t be paranoid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And they lead you on to war: A Fake War in the Himalayas? by Ranjit Devraj NEW DELHI (IPS) &#8211; This week&#8217;s stunning confessions by two Indian soldiers that they helped stage fake encounters with Pakistani troops on Siachen, often called the world&#8217;s highest, coldest and costliest battlefield, has renewed calls for demilitarizing the Himalayan [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}