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Book Review
A way forward for peace
SURESH NAMBATH
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The book proposes that peace initiatives between India and Pakistan must acknowledge their differences
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BATTLE FOR PEACE: Krishna Kumar; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 175.
History helps when it is left behind — this is what Krishna Kumar marks out as the central theme of his book, Battle for Peace, intended as a way forward for peace between India and Pakistan. Too narrow a focus on the shared history of the two countries, far from facilitating normal, peace-enabling exchanges, often sets up roadblocks in the search for peace. Understanding history is very different from living in the past, but even well-meaning peace advocates in India are often unable to see beyond the historical similarities between the two countries while looking to lay the basis for a peace dialogue and people-to-people contact.
Those in India seeking to establish peace with Pakistan by stressing on the similarities actually end up questioning the very basis of the Pakistani national identity. The starting point, then, must be a recognition of the differences, and not an understanding of the similarities. In Krishna Kumar’s phrasing: “Difficult though it is, we have to appreciate that Pakistan might have been similar to us once, but it is different from us now.”
Lessons
The book takes the argument forward by drawing lessons, almost as if by chance, from ordinary life. An educational tour of Birla House; a school essay written by a girl in Lahore; and an interview given by the Begum of Bhopal who had migrated to Pakistan in 1949 — all these are used, not as exemplification of points made in the book, but as accidentally discovered sources of illumination. The reader thus gets the feeling of being allowed a peek into the author’s thought-process, of being part of the same inquisitive journey.
The first question that Krishna Kumar throws up is through a teacher-trainee taking a tour of the Birla House. Why is the Birla House, where Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, almost blacked out of the national consciousness, while Rajghat, where he was cremated, is an important stop for casual tourists and visiting dignitaries alike? A part of the answer is what the author describes as a “silent agreement” between two rival parties, one standing for pluralistic secularism, and the other for religious or cultural nationalism. The agreement is not to revive the painful memories of the Partition, the context of Gandhiji’s assassination, and the battle of ideas with Gandhiji on one side and his killer, Nathuram Godse, on the other. Rajghat, the author argues, “seems eternal and without an immediate bearing on the passing moment.” Birla House, however, is a reminder that modern India “has not emerged from the battle in which Gandhi lost his life.”
Reality of Partition
Evidently, the overemphasis on the shared history and the similarities betrays an unwillingness or inability to come to terms with the reality of the Partition, the Hindu-Muslim divide, and questions of national identity. “When Gandhi died facing a fellow believer in Hinduism who shot him, he symbolised the folly of distinguishing those who are similar to us from those who are different.”
Indians fantasise that Pakistan would one day cease to exist as a nation, or that it would reunite with India. This, Krishna Kumar believes, is because of the continued, even if deeply-buried, anger over the Partition. Pakistan remains a “live wound” in the Indian national mind. The rise of the Islamisation ideology in Pakistan, and the Hindu revivalism in India, also prevented normalisation of relations between the two countries. Instead of opting for the path of progress and development, the two countries chose the path of nuclearisation, which, the author says, is an example of their “dependence on derivative policies originating from their colonial conditioning.”
Initiative for peace
Considering that the West has a vested interest in keeping the two countries warring with each other, the initiative for peace will have to come from the people of India and Pakistan. “We who live in India and Pakistan must realize that the politics of war and the social mindset which supports it are our own creations, and, therefore, we are the only ones who can change them.” In this task, Krishna Kumar sees a vital role for education: not the civic education that “aims at identification with one’s own nation and loyalty to its sovereign state,” but an education that “enables a child to accept the validity of competing memories.” An obsession with education for building national identity can be debilitating; the focus, instead, should be on an education that will “stop serving as an instrument of exclusion and injustice.”
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