The country needs to face the fact that if it does not look after the families of those who laid down their lives properly, few will fight in the future. The Government has think this through and create an environment in which every Indian becomes a part of the process of rebuilding the lives of these families. After all, these soldiers have given their lives not merely for the salaries they earned.

It is sad that the man considered to be one of the richest Indians in the world, Laxmi Narayan Mittal, who would probably have spent Rs 11 crore on a wedding, is donating only Rs 11 lakhs for those who actually contributed to safeguarding his wealth in India. Indian business houses think nothing of giving expensive cars to cricketers for scoring a century or winning a match. Let them now consider giving a certain percentage of theirprofits for the families of those who braved the bullets and drew their final breath on those heights.

Money is coming in but more of it needs to come. Twenty thousand evacuees in Kargil were without blankets. In many places ordinary people are giving a day's or a month's salary. G.K. Moopanar went around Chennai shaking a box and the TMC collected Rs 15 lakh in one day. These included contributions from those who would have foregone that night's meal. Two thousand prisoners in Banga-lore jail offered to go to Kargil and fight. The upsurge has affected the south as much as the north this time. Pe-ople want to help and they need to be tapped.

But money is only one -- and the easier -- part of it. Who is going to monitor what happens to the two-year-old son of Ajay Ahuja or to the children of so many others over the next 15 years, when th-ere are problems of getting admission into schools, into colleges, when the parents fall sick, when Diwali, Christmas or Eid come, when the long days and nights stretchon, year after year, through which these families have to live out the pride they have expressed in their sons and husbands as they bid them fa-rewell. Can we create a wider family for these families in each of the towns where they live, who keep a tab on their needs, and coordinate with the official mechanisms, of the army or the local administration, which can give material help. Maybe schools and colleges can adopt these families. Each town and village could devise a system of help and sustenance locally. What will help is not grandstanding but attention to the small details.Let every village and town of a martyred soldier have a memorial for these heroes so that their children can walk with their heads held high. In fact, the Red Fort, which houses museums on the INA and the 1857 war of independence, could be converted into a martyrs' memorial. Possi-bly this August 15, th-ere should be a martyr's evening instead of the usual reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

The plight of 1962 and 1965 war widowstestifies to how quickly the nation forgets its heroes. The social milieu is still not kind to widows and young widows find the going even more rough. It is not surprising that the wife of a jawan set herself and her two children on fire when she heard that her husband was missing. She died and he returned from Kargil to find two young children to look after.

Can the government, or the army or the NGOs or all the three together create SOS type of villages in the four corners of India for the families of the jawans who cannot manage on their own?

Can Kargil be an opportunity for mass mobilisation to change our social attitudes to, say, the widows? Let the lead be taken by the women of India, cutting across party lines. Can Priyanka Gandhi and Uma Bh-arati get on the same platform to do this to mobilise the youth? Their names are only illustrative. It can include others like the members of the families of Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose. Then there are so many others who can come forward like ShabanaAzmi, Manisha Koirala, Arundhati Roy, Vibha Parthasarthy, and above all the mothers and wives of the soldiers who have passed on -- the Begum Haneefuddins and Anita Ahujas. Some of these ideas may be dismissed as impractical. But let us at least continue to think of ways to help.

The Rajya Sabha session could have been called to channelise the sentiment generated in the country and show the world the strength of India's unity and democracy in a moment of crisis. The response of the political leadership has unfortunately been sectarian. It is more worried about the impending elections. The BJP alliance wants to avoid answering questions which they will have to do one day on why they were caught napping. The Opposition wants to take potshots at them.

Jawaharlal Nehru had said during the 1962 Chinese aggression, while moving a resolution in the Lok Sabha, that he had felt like thanking the Chinese government for their action for the simple reason that it had lifted the veil from the face of India. Kargil isone more opportunity to lift the veil from the face of India. There is a plaque in Kohima in the memory of those who died during the World War II. It reads: ``When you go ho-me, Tell them of us and say, For their tomorrow, We gave our today.''

The least that the country can do is to ensure that the tomorrow of the families of the Kargil soldiers is better than their today.