PHARSAMA: The mud house of Vijay Soreng, one of the 44 CRPF jawans killed in the
Pulwama terror bombing on February 14, is at the end of a newly laid road.
In Soreng’s village Pharsama, 100km southwest of Ranchi, the road to his house was completed last year, a few months before the Jaish-e-Mohammad suicide bombing, that killed him 2,000km away in Pulwama, became one of the biggest political issues for the
Narendra Modi government in the 2019 elections.
His mother, Lakshmi, 60, who is yet to recover from the grief of losing her 47-year-old son, however disagrees that the BJP government politicised the Pulwama killings. “I don’t think there is any politics in it,” she says, arguing that people in the country are talking about his son and other jawans on their own.
Wife of a retired soldier, 65-yearold Vrish, Lakshmi endorses the airstrikes on the Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camps in
Balakot
. “That was the right thing to do,” she says.
Sitting next to Lakshmi, her younger son, Sanjay, 40, says though their loss will never be reversed, the retaliation by the government and the forces brought the family a certain “satisfaction that our enemies got at least some response”. Lakshmi says the Modi government must be returned to office. “We should give them another five years,” Sanjay adds to his mother’s view. He believes that the Modi government has been working “a great deal” for India’s national security.
The entire village, he says, feels safer and better off with the current dispensation. In the last five years, concrete houses, toilets, electricity and water have been provided under various central government schemes. “A lot still needs to be done,” Sanjay and several people in the neighbourhood say, hoping that the Modi government will fulfil the promise that it would make Vijay’s native place a
model village
.
Vijay’s 21-year-old son Arun, a college student who lives with his mother, a policewoman with the 10th battalion of Jharkhand Armed Police in Ranchi, arrived in the village last night to cast his vote.
Pharsama in Basia block of Gumla district is part of the Lohardaga parliamentary constituency. “Our entire family went to the polling booth in the village this morning to fulfil our duty as Indian citizens even as we still grieve,” says Arun.