A peace movement is needed (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: International Relations
Prelims level: Pulwama Attack
Mains level: Gandhian Philosophy maintaining peace between two regions

Context

•  Our sense of peace is desperately in need of myths and storytellers.
•  The Pulwama event and after, we sense peace has lost autonomy as a narrative.
•  Peace has been reduced to the lull between two acts of violence, an uneasy interlude.
•  Our sense of war reads peace passively as a cessation of hostilities. Peace is more holistic and comprehensive in a way our current narratives do not capture.
•  It is a different world. While war is anchored on the parochialism of concepts like border, security and nation state, peace has to dig deep into the unconscious of theology, philosophy and civilisation to literally create an alternative world view. India desperately needs a peace movement.
• Beyond machismo
•  Our present vision of history and politics has become a handicap here.
•  There is an irony to the Gandhian movement in India. Satyagraha as an imagination has inspired exemplars abroad, including Václav Havel, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton and

Desmond Tutu, but it has lost its passion and vigour in India.

•  Today the Gandhian movement has died out, while Gandhians still play a role in other battles of resistance, such as the Narmada.
•  Our ashrams are no longer pilgrimages of the imagination.
•  They need to be revived to counter the think tanks of war and a middle class which craves the machismo of militarism.
•  As Gandhi pointed out, to be inventive, peace has to be both cognitive and ethical.
•  It has to go beyond moral rhetoric and create experimental possibilities of peace, and it has to transform ethics into a political act that transforms the dullness of current democracy.
•  The peace has to be seen as a craft, a lived world of meaning, not as a technocratic exercise.
•  It needs daily rituals of practice where life, livelihood, lifestyle follow the codes of non-violence.
•  One needs civilisational ideas on war, where a dialogue of religion creates an antidote to war.
•  The role of religion in peace is particularly crucial as our conventional spiritual leaders have become handymen of the state.

No democracy without peace

•  One has to recognise while there is a poetics to peace, there is also a prose to routine.
•  Time and the varieties of time become crucial in understanding peace.
•  Waiting for peace is almost the everyday burden of women in war zones as they wait for their loved ones to come back, and dream of the return to normalcy.
•  Once one realises peace is a craft, one has to prepare for it. It needs to see dialogue in creative ways.
•  India and Pakistan need a dialogue in the sense that Panikkar spoke about. In this context, a dialogue of the people must be accompanied by more specialised dialogues.
•  India has a chance to revive the power of the Pugwash movement. One has to remember that the first Pugwash conference was to meet in India till Cyrus Eaton hijacked it to Nova Scotia, his birthplace.
•  The new Pugwash should go beyond nuclear fiefdoms and challenge the inventiveness of violence.
•  It provides an opportunity for the satyagrahi and the scientist to blend in creative ways. The encounter between India and Pakistan must create wider models for thinking about peace.

Way forward

•  India as a civilisation, a nation state and a democracy has a major resource to fall back on in the wisdom of our cultures and civilisations.
•  It reminds me of an oft-repeated story from the Nazi era. Once the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, claimed that every time he heard the word culture, he reached for his gun.
•  The fittest reply came from a scholar, a Harvard professor called Alexander Gerschenkron.
•  He replied that every time he heard the guns, he reached for his culture.
•  It is time India goes beyond the grammar of surgical strikes and reaches for its cultures of peace, pilgrimage and understanding.

Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Prelims Questions:

Q.1) Which of the following statements about the gross value added (GVA) method of GDP calculation is/are correct?
1. It is a method for calculating GDP at basic prices.
2. It gives a picture of economic activities in a country from the producers’ side.

Select the correct answer using the code given below.
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: C

Mains Questions:
Q.1) India and Pakistan must re-imagine the border as a fold of peace instead of as a threshold of hostilities. Comment.