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US-Israel must not light a Jauhar pyre in Iran—Rajput warriors had nothing to lose

History’s most dangerous soldiers are the ones fighting because they have nothing left to lose. America and Israel have just created millions of them.

In the martial tradition of Rajputana, when a fort was surrounded by an overwhelmingly superior force and defeat was certain, the defenders performed a ritual called Jauhar. The women and children of the garrison, rather than facing capture, enslavement, or worse, would climb a great pyre of wood and immolate themselves. The fort’s smoke was visible from miles away.

When the besieging army saw that smoke, they did not celebrate. They shuddered. Because they knew what came next. The Rajput warriors, having witnessed their families burn alive, having lost every reason to remain alive, would wrap a kafan — a burial shroud — around their heads, storm open the fort gates, and sally out. Not to survive or negotiate, but to kill and die, taking as many of the enemy with them as possible. Men who have already died inside cannot be threatened, bargained with, or stopped by the fear of death. They are, in the most literal sense, unstoppable.

Jauhar was not merely a ritual of honour. It was a strategic weapon—the nuclear deterrent of its age. The destruction of everything a man loves does not break his will to fight. It removes the only thing that might have restrained it.

When punishment becomes fuel

The US logic behind incessantly bombing Iran is that insufferable destruction will break the population’s will to resist. This logic, as history demonstrates with brutal consistency, is almost always wrong.

Consider Chechnya. Russia’s campaigns reduced Grozny to rubble, described by the UN as the most destroyed city on earth. Russia, one of history’s most formidable military powers, was fought to a humiliating ceasefire by a territory so small it barely registers as a dot on a map of Russia—19,000 square kilometres against 17 million. 

The second campaign was even more savage. But it did not end the conflict. It exported it. Chechen fighters brought the war to the Russian mainland—the Moscow theatre siege, the Beslan school massacre, apartment bombings in the capital itself. 

The harder Russia squeezed, the further the violence spread.

The lesson is not unique to Chechnya. The British in Ireland. The French in Algeria. The Americans in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Overwhelming force applied to a population stripped of dignity, family, and hope does not produce surrender. It produces a generation for whom violence is no longer a last resort. It is the only remaining language.

Nineteen men armed with box cutters and the willingness to die brought the most powerful nation on earth to its knees on a September morning in 2001. The prime ingredient for unstoppable terror is not a large army, money, or nuclear enrichment. It is desperation. And desperation is precisely what is being sown, at an industrial scale, in Iran today.

Also read: Iran war is a sign to course correct for India. Navy must step up

Epic Fury and the Versailles trap

Ironically, the US has named its Iranian campaign ‘Epic Fury’. History already has a word for what epic fury inflicted on a proud, humiliated nation produces. It is called Versailles.

The Treaty of Versailles did not end the First World War. It incubated the Second. The humiliation heaped upon Germany, the reparations, the territorial amputations, and the deliberate national degradation did not break the German people’s will. It ignited it. It was that humiliation which created Hitler, and the world paid with fifty million lives. Extreme and mass punishment do not extinguish pent-up rage. It concentrates it. A lesson that Israel, whose founding was forged in the aftermath of that very catastrophe, ought to have remembered best.

The architects of Versailles were not stupid men. But they made the oldest mistake in the strategist’s handbook: they confused the end of a war with the end of a grievance. Grievances do not die with treaties. They go underground, ferment, and return, compounded, radicalised, and unrestrained. What is being done to Iran today is Versailles with bombs. The current generation of American and Israeli decision-makers may not live to bear its full consequences. Their children will.

The progression of an unconstrained conflict is textbook. First, violence is contained within the theatre. Then, as conventional capacity is degraded, the conflict mutates, fragmenting into cells, dispersing across borders, losing uniformity until it becomes indistinguishable from the civilian population. The Gulf states are the first spillover zone. Europe, with its large Iranian diaspora, is next. Eventually, the conflict arrives where the architects of this campaign live, work, and send their children to school.

Rage, when compressed beyond a certain point, does not subdue. It detonates elsewhere. The Chechens did not stay in Chechnya. The Afghan mujahideen did not stay in Afghanistan. Ninety million Iranians. A diaspora of four million across Western cities. A civilisation that has already buried its supreme leader, its scientists, its soldiers, and its schoolchildren. When Trump dismisses them as ‘losers’, he is not weakening their resolve. He is creating people with nothing to lose.

Also read: Strait of Hormuz crisis shows limits of US, say Chinese. ‘India most vulnerable’

A reason to choose peace

The Rajput siege did not always end in Jauhar. When a besieging commander was wise enough to offer terms that preserved honour, that gave the defenders a reason to lay down their arms rather than light the pyre, the slaughter was averted. The wisdom was not in the strength of the besieging army. It was in understanding that a defeated enemy who retains his dignity is a future ally. A defeated enemy stripped of everything is an eternal enemy.

Despite its failings, Iran’s leadership is not irrational. It has survived eight years of war with Iraq, fought with chemical weapons, endured decades of sanctions, and absorbed two rounds of devastating strikes. It understands power. What Iran needs to choose peace is not further humiliation, but terms that its leadership can present to its people without triggering the Jauhar dynamic that makes this conflict unwinnable. Sane voices in Washington, Tel Aviv, and the international community must create that path. Before the smoke spreads to every continent. 

As the Bible teaches—the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. The generation that lit the pyre may not be the one that burns in it. But burn it will. History’s verdict on those who push enemies past the point of hope has never been kind. It won’t be this time either.

The author is former CEO of NATGRID and president of Risk & Security Reliance Industries. Views are personal.

(Edited by Saptak Datta)

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