There is something eerie about the reportage on our recent confrontation with Pakistan. The entire battle is presented as a strategic or gaming technique. Some news presentations share similarities with academic conferences. It is almost as if a war is presented with human interest elan.
The policy presentations are seen plurally—one minister is presented as an intellectual, another as emphasising the political. Yet another becomes a deeply prophetic character in articulating defence as an immaculate conception. There is an impoverishment here. Patriotism is presented as a kind of moral rearmament while the entire debate takes place without any ethical framework. War is seen more as a gaming technique than a set of ethical choices.
A critique of such a situation cannot be presented in the framework of party politics—a clash between the regime and the opposition. It needs to be viewed within more holistic frameworks that transcend the parochialism of current politics. One of the suggested heuristics is to view it in the framework of futuristics.
The concept of the future articulates both ethical possibilities and the idea of alternatives. Futures as an academic domain helped articulate a critique of communist regimes. Futures as a framework now presents the moral possibility of seeing it in terms of a more plural domain where ethics, politics and strategy combine to create a set of decision-making frameworks. The idea of futures lets us go beyond the immediacy and parochialism of today’s interest, into the articulation of what would be good for India a decade hence.
Such a debate cannot be confined to strategic and technical terms. Ethics and strategy both need an ordinary language of articulation. We need an everydayness of language and ethics to permeate how we think of war and peace. We need to formulate questions, possibilities, and consequences in an everyday language. This may not be technically impressive or academically quotable, but it democratises our choice and lets defence enter the moral domain—which is sorely missing. One has to repeatedly emphasise that patriotism is no substitute for morality.
Three sets of questions immediately confront us. The first is India’s dream of being a democracy that allows choice and is transparent to governance. The militarisation of the neighbourhood has immediate consequences. First, there is a straight weave of internal and external security. Security, rather than democracy, becomes the goal of the nation. And India becomes, with repeated incidences of terrorism, a securitarian state. Terror creates a national security state where citizens become an object of vigilance.
The question is clear: how does one sustain one’s freedom of conversation, one’s openness of choice in a militarised situation? It is in this context that the panopticised term ‘urban Naxal’ appears to cover all dissenters and threats within a securitarian situation. It’s true India needs a powerful army. But it’s even truer that India needs an open democracy. How does democracy sustain itself in situations of violence?
This situation becomes even more acute when the whole region becomes nuclear. It transforms the way we think of war and death. Body counts become a standard form of cost-benefit and genocide acquires everydayness. Once you establish a nuclear regime, the possibilities of democracy diminish further. Once we confront a nuclear regime that is as irresponsible as Pakistan, it does not remain an easy option—it changes the way we think about the body, everyday choices and the economics of decision-making.
Articulating such issues in the language of everyday ethics is not easy. However, with the use of metaphor and storytelling, our moralists need to do so. Democracy, in that sense, is always a futuristic framework which has to be built into the choices we make today. Every choice now is one for the future. India, if it wishes to remain democratic and survive beyond majoritarianism, must consider a more supple, unconventional and innovative democracy.
Let’s take an example. The great Nicobar project has been a source of tremendous controversy. Indian environmentalists and journals have assembled a formidable critique of it. Yet, after the Pahalgam incident, these environmentalists are treated as anti-social and antinational. Today, within the national security state, not only have external and internal security been combined, but also war and development.
The Great Nicobar project is now viewed as a military initiative aimed at countering China. It is China, more than Pakistan, that is a threat to democracy. China has even fewer problems with genocide.
One has to open up new dialogues and perspectives on China. One of the most critical and urgent problems we will face is a set of dams China is building above the Northeast. These dams can annihilate the economy of the Northeast and become a tool for ecocide. The challenge is how to dialogue with China on such a critical issue that involves the life, livelihood and fate of marginal groups on both sides of the border.
The question is about handling such issues democratically. The problemsolving faces new problems of the future that we have not thought about as a polity. In this context, one has to rethink the importance of peace and Gandhian thought. Gandhi did not spend time thinking about either the concentration camp or the atomic bomb—those are the limits his idea of satyagraha has to meet. We are facing not just mechanical obsolescence, but more a genocidal exuberance.
India has to rework itself as a civilisation. Reinvent itself as a democracy. Its current frameworks, though successful thus far, may not survive in the future. We need to talk to China differently. We need to create a politics that transcends the Trumps.
We need to create a vision of South Asia that goes beyond the current frameworks of the United Nations. Peace can no longer be a restricted, passive word—it has to invent possibilities, alternatives that go beyond the immediacy of war. This is democracy’s greatest challenge: to invent a future where peace remains central to the visions of South Asia and the world.
Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations.
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)