Let’s Be Clear About Who Dies in a War...

The kettle hisses. The dog sleeps. The television drones on. Somewhere, someone is already dying. I am not a soldier. I am not a politician. I am just here slouched, half-watching, half-scrolling, a couch-bound spectator to catastrophe. The war has started, or maybe it started years ago and simply changed channels.

Last night, a retired colonel slid toy tanks across a digital map, narrating with the detachment of a bank clerk. Red zones. Green corridors. All colour-coded for civilian understanding.

This is how war unfurls now, euphemisms in fatigues.

“Objectives.”

“Liberation.”

“Precision.”

Words that arrive before the bombs and linger longer than the dead. War is here, and I am still barefoot in my living room, arguing with a remote that won’t mute the missiles.

In between swipes, I stream Michael Ware’s Only the Dead. There’s a moment brief, brutal, unbearably still a marketplace seconds after an airstrike. Not yet rubble, not quite a place. Dust hangs in the air, thick and breathing. A child’s sandal lies upturned by a basket of pomegranates, their ruptured flesh gleaming like exposed organs. The camera does not flinch. There are no screams. Not yet. Just silence, blooming like heat on skin.

In the film, a soldier documents his own unraveling. He begins with belief, ends with emptiness. Faith itself is collateral damage just another body stepped over, unseen.

But it's not the bodies that haunt it’s the syntax. The repetition. The checkpoints. The checkpoints. The checkpoints. 

Empire speaks in acronyms and erasure. And the civilians? They drift past like technical errors. A girl blinks away dust. An old man fumbling memory, unsure which son is still alive. 

The pomegranates rot quietly in the sun.

Half past noon. The sun, indifferent as ever.

That scene again the sandal and the fruit plays every time I blink. A child’s life interrupted mid-step. And I am still here, shifting position on the couch, refilling my cup, pausing to Google “casualties” before promptly clicking away.

There is something almost pastoral obscene, about watching conflict unfold from the padded sanctity of a living room. The cushions are plump. The outrage curated. Commentary flows with the confident ignorance of someone clutching a microphone, not a tourniquet. News-anchor’s certainty masquerades as knowledge. Clichés goose-step across my screen. The war has background music as well.

In New Delhi, where the summer’s blister and the moral compass spins like a fan with no regulator, war has been dressed up for prime time. It arrives with ticker tape: missile ranges in neat bullet points, flags and flames in split screens, war breaths as hashtags that trend between cricket scores and Bollywood gossip. Retired colonels explain “incursions” like they’re plotting picnics. When the anchor says, “collateral damage”, it gets the same tonal register as the pollen count. A minor disturbance. Skies remain partly patriotic.

Outside, hunger walks to deliver food and stray dogs nap in the shade of flyovers, a street vendor slices mangoes, their golden flesh sticky with juice. I wonder if the war will arrive at my doorstep before the fruit ripens.

I’m told the weapons are newer now. Sleeker. Shinier. Drones hum like lullabies. The language though remains medieval. "Teach them a lesson,” they say, as if nations are errant schoolboys. "Surgical strike,” as if precision justifies butchery. Between reels, recipes and discount codes, war would slip into your phone like an afterthought. 

We have perfected the pornography of war.

The most harrowing moment of Michael Ware’s documentary isn’t the muzzle flash or the shriek of incoming shells. It’s an old man in Baghdad once the city of libraries, poems, and zeroes sitting behind the ruins of his shop. He says, “First they took our present. Then they stole the future. Now even the past is gone the photographs, the birth certificates, the marriage contracts. How do you mourn what you can’t prove existed?” His voice doesn’t crack. It splinters.

But I’m distracted. A food delivery app pings with a promo code. Thankfully, the orphan that every "decisive blow" create, don’t appear in victory parades.

Evening falls. Somewhere, a 'mock' drill unfolds with precise indifference.

A notification buzzes Breaking: Nine sites bombed. The refrigerator hums. The ceiling fan stutters. The dog sighs mid-dream, chasing something only he knows. I scroll past the news, pause on a meme, double-tap a photo of someone's lunch.

The documentary tears through the polite fiction that wars ever end. They don’t. They sink into groundwater and lullabies. They cling to the corners of DNA like dust in old books. Years later, they surface again when a mother jolts at Diwali firecrackers, or a veteran mistakes a pothole for an IED and flings himself into civilian grass.

And yet, here in India, we draft fresh acts for this ancient script, a script we never really stopped rehearsing. The vocabulary remains unchanged: surgical strike, zero tolerance, ghar me ghus ke maaro phrases paraded with chest-thumping certainty, bleached of meaning by repetition, like slogans fading on sunburnt walls.

Somewhere, in a conference room scented with synthetic incense, men in starched shirts are playing god with aerial maps. They confuse detachment with strategy. Their fingertips never brush the soil they decide to scorch. 

The dead, in whose name all this is being done, would neither return fire nor ask questions. They do not file Right to Information requests. They are the most obedient citizens any nation could hope for.

Much like the dead, we too won't discuss war; we will consume it. Like those British families who picnicked at Waterloo, we will lay out snacks on blood-soaked earth and call it national pride. 

Midnight. A battle rages and so do the retweets.

Somewhere, cities crumble. Here, I refresh the feed.

We mouth the lines first gently fed, then algorithmically spooned, then hammered home in trending fonts: War is peace. Dissent is treason. Questions are grenades.

So we do not ask: Why this war? Who profits? Whose children won’t wake up tomorrow?

These are not questions for model citizens. These are the questions of traitors. And we know what happens to traitors. The studio panel told us last night.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said in Beyond Vietnam, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

And indeed, we are spiritually exhausted.

So, we repeat the script handed down like a family heirloom:
That every war is the war to end all wars.
That every missile is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
That grief is regrettable, but patriotic.
That pride in the motherland rises best from rubble.

We change the place names like channel numbers but keep the storyline intact. Replace Baghdad with Gaza with Manipur with Srinagar with wherever the signal drops.

The coordinates change. The graves remain constant.

Dawn. The birds sing anyway.

Mahmoud Darwish once wrote: "The wars will end, and the leaders will shake hands, and that old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son, and that girl will wait for her beloved husband, and the children will wait for their heroic father."

This is the arithmetic they never teach – that war subtracts first from the poor, multiplies the grief of women, divides land into ever-smaller graves. The equations always balance, but only because we don't count certain variables. The calculus of nationalism demands invisible minuses: a farmer's life in Punjab equals a militant's death in Kupwara equals a statistic in South Block's files.

Ware's documentary shows us the receipts. The unpaid bills. The compound interest of trauma that generations will service. When the camera captures an insurgent's last moments – not as propaganda but as a man whispering his mother's name – it asks us the only moral question war permits: Is this exchange rate acceptable?

The answer, like the dead, never lies. It simply waits beneath the rubble of every bombed city, beneath the rhetoric of every statesman, beneath the footnotes of every history textbook that records wars but not the weight of a child's body pulled from concrete.

The war goes on and so does the day.

Let’s be clear about who dies in a war.

Not those who win elections, not the ones who smile through press conferences or tweet out condolences. Not the news anchors in fireproof studios, adjusting their ties between commercial breaks. It’s the ordinary ones. People no different from the 26 already lost, except they didn’t make it into headlines with names.

Here on my sofa, the casualties arrive as numbers. Rounded off. Smoothed out. The news cuts to a graphic. Somber music. A quick nod from the anchor. Then a panel of experts. Then an ad for detergent.

One day, the guns may fall silent. The treaties will be signed. The flags will be raised, and history books will call it a “turning point.”
But mothers will still stand in doorways that lead to empty rooms. Children will still wait by phones that never ring.

And we watching all this between sips of tea, between WhatsApp forwards and IPL replays will go on calling it necessary. Inevitable. A price worth paying.

War now is a background app draining the battery of a nation while we binge-watch, doom-scroll, reheat leftovers, and wait for the next season of whatever’s trending.

The dead do not interrupt the feed.

Raj Shekhar Sen is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.