M. Prabhu did not die on the battlefield. According to news reports, the soldier from Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri had been posted in Jammu and Kashmir but was home on leave when it all happened. A fracas with a councillor of the ruling DMK, A. Chinnaswamy, and his aides. Prabhu and his brother Prabhakaran were beaten up with wooden logs and iron rods. A senior DMK leader, TKS Elangovan, said, “This is happening everywhere… These are all small things.”
A military detail
From Calcutta to UP’s Shahjahanpur, it is not uncommon to hear of ministers and their immediate and extended kin slapping government servants, beating them up, making them tie their shoelaces and so on and so forth. The word VIP is supposed to have started its life as a military abbreviation in the early parts of the 20th century. But Prabhu may not have known that. After all, in India, for years now, VIP has come to mean anyone who can do what all others expressly cannot. Creatures who derive their very-importantness from the non-important, riding on their votes, the taxes they pay, their fandom, their services. Even at temples and pandals, VIP darshan is an accepted thing, which is basically jargon for jumping the queue.
What passing-bells?
Union minister Smriti Irani seems to think scrapping the Haj quota available to VIPs is sign enough that VIP culture is “coming to an end in the country”. But there are VIP quotas in the railways and VIP facilities fast-tracking them through life and it doesn’t stop at death. VIP cremation grounds, VIP pyre platforms, even VIP pyres, exist. Lance Naik M. Prabhu and his brother had possibly got into a disagreement with the DMK councillor over something to do with washing clothes near the town panchayat's water tank. The specifics of that disagreement, if there was a caste spin to it, etc. is not clear yet, may never be. M.Prabhu fell martyr to VIP culture. Owen was bang on all those years ago, “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” His second line though begs for an update. “Only the monstrous entitlement of the VIPs.”
