BY
SAGARIKA GHOSE
As temperatures rise on both sides, a group of Indian and Pakistani `peacemongers' has signed a joint resolution urging both governments to take urgent steps to improve relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. But is there any space for peaceniks, for aman ki asha, in the prevailing hyper-nationalistic war hysteria?
Yes, there is. However utopian their cause, peacemongers are better patriots than warmongers. Warmongers espouse war, knowing they or their Ivy League-bound children will never have to face a hail of bullets. In air-conditioned comfort, they want the sons of the poor to stand against their imagined enemy , the blood of jawans an elixir of their cocktail party rage. When 22-year-old soldiers or Kashmiri teenagers die, they shrug off responsibility .
Calls for war tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, they fuel more violence leading to even more demands for war. In the process the government escapes all accountability and responsibility , and attention is diverted from the substantive reasons for conflict. India's biggest victory against Pakistan came in 1971 when a canny prime minister did not, in fact, listen to irresponsible cries for war and instead, on the advice of then Army chief Sam Manekshaw, waited patiently for the right moment to actually go into a battle.
Today, a resounding call for an end to the eyeball-toeyeball confrontation is a must, simply because the consequences of war are devastating. Calling for peace does not mean asking the military to meekly lay down weapons if the enemy is intent on conflict. Instead it means reaching out to higher values that go beyond treating war as a bloodstained scoreboard of who killed how many . Peace is not just about the cessation of physical conflict but a hearkening to the underlying values on which India is based. India's foundation is the courage of satyagraha; not a simplistic laying down of arms in the face of terrorism. Gandhi was hardly a “peacemonger“ in the pejorative sense -he supported the allies in the two World Wars provided they upheld the values of human dignity and individual freedom. Lighting candles at Wagah is not an end in itself but a reminder that the most epic battle of all is the battle for basic values and a triumph of means over ends. Through the communal pogroms of 1946-47, Gandhi trudged alone through Bengal and Bihar, bringing more calm than any government could. He had no weapons, only the power of his values.
Values win, weapons don't. Without values, a peace clamped through superior firepower is hardly worth achieving. An imaginary war with Pakistan may appease the domestic nationalist constituency for the moment, but the need for people-to-people contact between cricketers, artists and actors was never greater. After Independence, Gandhi repeatedly asked Britishers to stay on in India: not as masters but as equals. Tagore invited the world to come to India. When soldiers are left to fight without any accompanying outreach of cross-border contacts, dialogue and compassion in Kashmir, a professional army is reduced to an armed militia, a mirror image of the terrorist.
That's why India's government must now hasten to the dialogue table. No more lives (either of jawans or 14-year-old Kashmiris) can be lost. New Delhi has negotiated with Naga militants, signed peace accords in Mizoram, allowed ULFA rebels to come overground. Why then will India now not talk to all Kashmiri stakeholders? Even if there are strains of radical Islamism within the Kashmir insurgency , the Indian state cannot be seen to disengage from talking and reaching out. Peacemongers have a crucial patriotic role here: they stand by as bridge-builders between government and people.
In fact, calling for peace with Pakistan and dialogue in Kashmir is a far greater act of patriotism than calls for violence. What would the Mahatma have done? He would have sat on a fast at Lal Chowk in Srinagar until stone-pelters and Army stopped their endless confrontation. He would know, as we must, that the barrel of the AK-47 will never provide a solution. When the A-G declares in the Supreme Court that India will never talk to separatists or when BJP president Amit Shah tells party workers in Jammu to simply focus on Jammu and Ladakh and ignore the Valley , the opportunity to save lives of jawans, officers and stone-pelters is irretrievably lost. India's patriotism has always been nonviolent and inclusive; India did not win its freedom by calling for bloodletting and death.
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