Why has India failed Suryanarayana

India might be growing in strature in the economy of the world. We might be way above the developing world and we might be closing the distance between us and the developed countries but we need to realize now that we would need to take more drastic, more controversial and more risky decisions to reach the status of a superpower because the next mountain would always be bigger than the one we have just conquered.

What troubles me today is the fact that we have failed to stand up for ourselves. The issue in hand is the murder and beheading of the Indian telecom engineer, K. Suryanarayana in Afghanistan.

Suryanarayana, was abducted by the Taliban on a national highway near Kabul last month. After about 24 hours, Qari Yousaf, the spokesman of Taliban was out with their demands. This is what the Taliban wanted India to do

1. We should announce that we are closing down our embassy in Kabul.
2. That we are also closing down the consulates in a number of provincial capitals in Afghanistan.
3. All Indians working in Afghanistan should pullout.
4. All projects undertaken by Indian firms in Afghanistan should be stopped.

They also placed a 24-hour deadline from 6pm on Saturday to 6pm on Sunday along with the threat that failure to accept the demands would result in the death of our citizen.

This time the Indian Government acted faster than ever before and a team of negotiators left for Kabul the same day. (Last time we had left it upto the Afghanistan Government) But even before they get there, Suryanarayana is not just murdered, he is beheaded and dropped near the same highway where he was abducted.

Suryanarayana must have been kept somewhere close to where he was abducted and eventually murdered because if doesn't make sense to come back to the same place just to drop off his body. It is a different thing that the Afghan Government told us that the area was completely searched and there was no trace of him there. It just makes me feel that they never did anything to save the man who was cremated yesterday.

It seems to me that Taliban never hoped that the impossible demands that they had placed would ever be met. It seems that it was all just a cover up for the monstrosity that was committed. They might have as well just killed him and asked the Indian Government to go fuck itself. And still the situation would not have been much different.

What does India do when something like this happens? They simply condemn it.

We are not supposed to just condemn acts like this one. You condemn a killing when a European is abducted and killed in Rio de Janeiro. When it is one of our own, we need to make a stand, we need to have a reaction, we need to have a voice of our own.

I hardly see any blogger getting outraged by the fact that we as a country have failed Suryanarayana. There are a million blogs who are crying against the reservations because we like to keep fighting within ourselves because we know that the other person is as timid as the other. But when as outsider screws up our family, we forget all about it. It is a pity that such a thing ever happened and we as India, did nothing about it.

I fail to understand why the Indian Government has responded the way it did. Is it because we are trying to showcase our Gandhian Ideology or because we're just a bunch of cowards?

Tagged Suryanarayana, Beheading, Afghanistan, India