In the weeks preceding Diwali anyone who would switch on the car radio, watch TV or go on social media would note that we all, from the prime minister to ordinary citizens who want their opinions known, wished Happy Diwali to the soldiers on our borders. One could put that down to the enhanced mood after surgical strikes and undoubtedly our soldiers must get our support. But what’s noteworthy is that we seem so enthralled by military tales that we did not care that Diwali must have been awful for the evicted villagers of border villages, and that there are many Indians who cannot afford to blow up crackers, Chinese- or Indian-made.Post Diwali, we have now had the Bhopal encounter . This is not the first “fake” encounter in our history and the Congress rule too will be forever tainted by the many encounters that were staged in Punjab during the era of violent militancy by sections of the Sikh community.But questions were always asked. The Bhopal encounter is possibly the first where we have seen video footage of what seems to be an execution. Yet members of the ruling party and some news anchors have forcefully stated that demanding accountability amounts to treason. They are, in other words, making an argument for extra-judicial killings.There is simultaneously a project to present Islamist terrorism as the gravest threat confronting the nation, overriding hunger, displacement, illiteracy, a stagnant economy. From Kashmir to alleged SIMI terrorists, to our persistent problem with Pakistan, it’s all presented as part of the same package. We are being posited as a nation busy tackling both an external and internal threat that is apparently interchangeable.This militarisation of the national imagination has consequences for the future. From being a country which, at the time of its inception, worried about human suffering and need, we are headed to being one that seeks conquest and tales of victory, real or imagined.The little people do not count in this master narrative unless the threads of their stories can be made to tie in with it. Those who protest are not really heard, and if so then only as troublesome people and/or traitors. Describing dissent as treason is unhealthy in any democracy because we are then more inclined to believe false, one-sided narratives.But there are other outcomes of buying into the belief that military/ police strategies provide solutions to complex problems. A militarised imagination would have damaging consequences for the polity, society and the forces. First, politicians would be more inclined to seek military solutions to internal and external conflicts, if such strategies are seen to be popular.Such hard options would also be an easy way to divert from shortcomings of other policies and initiatives. Escalation is, therefore, inbuilt in the positioning of a hardline state.Second, there is a social cost: if we go around executing people or subduing populations with pellet guns, we increase alienation. The BJP has no electoral stake in the nation’s largest minority and it is therefore easy to bait backward clerics even as there’s no cost to shooting down Muslim undertrials in staged encounters. In Kashmir, too, we have just gone backwards even as we choose to ignore many realities on the ground.Finally, there is a cost on the forces and the police who are likely to be used in many more high-risk strategies, often ill-equipped, and poorly compensated as the OROP issue reminds us. On the one hand, it appears that they will enjoy even greater immunity for human rights lapses and/or mistakes, such as those that allowed terrorists to walk into an army base in Uri or for terror accused to break jail in Bhopal.But the valorisation of soldiers is also a false image as it is not really about soldiers at all, but about enhancing the image of a few politicians and altering the national identity.Moreover, can we afford to forget that India has been the most successful democracy among postcolonial nations of the 20th century because the political class endured and we set up a credible system of elections, continuous and cyclical as they may appear to be? We were fortunate in that we never had coups and military takeovers that have blighted nascent democracies across Asia, including in our neighbourhood The Indian military and police, thankfully, remain answerable to the political class. But we now stand at a curious junction where we are deriding most politicians as venal, corrupt, stupid (as some of them are) even as we make arguments to maintain that the soldier on the border and the police in our cities are above being questioned. We appear to be regressing.(The writer is a freelance journalist)