I began thinking about this article on Buddha purnima last week. I realised that Buddha was an ideal peacenik—acute on cosmology and imaginative on civics. He would have been the ideal peacemaker between India and Pakistan. With this thought, I realised the importance of struggling with my own idea of peace, even if it existed in fragments.
In a way, terror emasculates citizenship. The idea of citizenship—one that adopts a critical approach to power and governance—gets emasculated. I sensed that terror distracts. It distorts and displaces. And, in a way, terror also dislocates.
But first of all, terror devalues the human being. It reduces the body to a statistical mortal. The body loses its sanctity and, in becoming a statistic, it becomes an object of contempt. The disappearance of the body is the first act of terrorism.
Secondly, Pahalgam showed that responses to terrorism can become warped. Terrorism demands a machismo of responses, each more devastating than the other. The word to describe it is anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s idea of ‘schizogenesis’—a process where a society or group experiences increasing divergence and disintegration due to escalating, mutually reinforcing patterns of communication—which leads to a continuous escalation of violence. This leaves no possibility for the redemption of peace.
Terror removes the very nature of rationality. Between fear and irrationality, war becomes an immediate prospect, and Pahalgam was an illustration of that. India’s clarity of response only escalated the possibilities of retaliation.
The situation, as one sees it now, has elements of a sordid play. Donald Trump adds both to the confusion and the possibility. At one level, he tries to create a possibility of negotiation. Negotiation merely becomes an epidemic of threats or incentives to trade terror for some larger temptation. The whole process of negotiation is manipulative. While Trump looks triumphant about a break in war, one faces the prospect of a continuous breakdown. There is no ecosystem for peace—that is what haunts us today.
One of the challenges we face today in the post-Pahalgam era is the absence of peace. We need a new language of peace, which cannot be restricted to incentives and negotiation. Its absence is stark. At the risk of annoyance, I would like to make the following suggestions for peace.
Firstly, Indian democracy has to re-assert itself to ensure that its model always contains a yearning for peace. Here, peace is not a passive concept. It is a dream of alternatives, possibilities and one of the utopias we have to invoke is to revive the idea of South Asia. For this, India and Pakistan cannot be seen as nation-states. The nation-state as a possibility exhausts itself as an instrument of peace. What one needs is a broader idea of the commons in South Asia.
The second critical requirement is the idea of memory. Memory is the crucial grove—the poetics making peace a possibility.
I remember lecturing on partition at Lady Irwin College. As soon as I finished the talk, the college principal hurried me to a room and said her family was from Lahore. She excitedly showed me the picture of a haveli on her computer. “This is the home where my sister and I spent our childhood,” she said. “Even today, we debate whether the swing was on the left or the right.” It shows how memory can become absolutely crucial to retaining the idea of peace. Between the region as a commons and memory as the glue, the outline of peace as possibility becomes distinct.
The third point I want to make is that peace cannot be passive. It requires the inventiveness of civil society. One needs a new set of experiments and possibilities. One has to make suggestions where the Constitution and the syllabus intersect. The directive principles of the Constitution have to provide the tacit imagination of peace. As a discourse, they must become a continuous possibility for new peace projects, for new possibilities. Optimism, in fact, becomes the realism of the future.
What the Constitution emphasises as a heuristic, a hypothesis has to be worked out as a syllabus. Peace has to be built into the very act of pedagogy. It is not an easy task, but a worthwhile one.
One has to realise peace is not an act of weakness, but a futuristic act of resilience. It is an act of imagination that keeps democracy alive and playful.
One would also like to suggest a series of inventive projects between the two countries. Civil society must be reactivated. New kinds of encounters must be invented. In this context, one has to emphasise India as a trustee of the Islamic imagination, a lived example of a pluralistic Islam. The Sufi sense of peace has to be relived, retalked and reinvented. Democracy has to become a heuristic for peace.
For this, we have to work towards a deeper sense of reciprocity, a more inventive sense of dialogue. One has to move beyond the inanity of terror as an idea. General Asim Munir’s idea of difference between Hindus and Muslims is an inanity—one that is lethal. It is a lethality that assumes any difference is harmful. The very fact that the only question asked of the tourists was whether they were Hindu or Muslim reflects this nature. Terror needs to be challenged with courage as an imagination. Terror needs to be reworked through dialogue.
Peace, therefore, becomes a continuous effort with an everydayness of reworking, of dreaming. For this, a crucial requirement is a return to storytelling—one that reworks the relationship, rewrites the myth of India-Pakistan. Storytelling can reinvent myths and possibilities, and revive old dreams.
It’s time South Asia becomes the theatre for new possibilities of peace. We should open more initiatives without the need for a ham-handed Trump telling us what to do. If peace is an invention, then we have to be the inventors of the new alternatives. Peace and democracy now have to become the ultimate source of inventiveness. Only then will war become a remote possibility.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)