The crash of Air India Flight 171 has claimed 121 souls, but the real catastrophe is unfolding on the ground. As investigators sift through the wreckage, a predictable diplomatic squabble has erupted: India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation points fingers at Pakistan’s air traffic control, while Islamabad retorts with accusations of pilot error and lax maintenance. This is not a search for truth.
It is a theatre of nationalist vanity, a descent into the kind of intellectual decadence that plagued the late Roman Empire. We trade evidence for insults, accountability for political grandstanding. The families of the dead deserve better than this circus.
They deserve a cold, hard look at the facts, not a tug-of-war between bureaucrats in New Delhi and Islamabad. The Victorian era, for all its flaws, at least understood that an empire’s honour was built on competence and integrity, not on bluster. Today, we see only a race to the bottom, where the dead are mere pawns in a game of diplomatic posturing.
Let us stop this charade. Let the investigators work without the noise of nationalism. The victims of this crash are not Indians or Pakistanis.
They are human beings, and their memory has been desecrated enough.
