Peace hath her victories

TODAY, July 15, 2001, the President of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of India are meeting at their much-hyped summit in Agra. For several weeks, we have been inundated with "summit talk". Today, many hearts and minds across our hostile borders will wonder whether and if something will come out of all this.

But whether one is an optimist or a pessimist, the summit allows us to assess where we stand. Talk of peace, of compromise, of reasonableness, is considered weakness by those caught in the web of "security-speak". Yet, are either of our nations strong just because we are nuclear powers? Can we really hold our heads up high in the world when internally our societies are divided, weak, exploitative? Where women, children, minorities and the poor must struggle to survive? Where the corrupt are celebrated and the honest victimised? Is it weakness to ask these questions?

In the flood of newspaper articles, photographs and television shows that have preceded today's meeting between Pakistan's President and our Prime Minister, one story stood out. Kamla Devi, mother of Lance Naik Azad Singh, who was killed in Kargil, was asked how she felt about the Pakistani President's visit. She said, "If I get a chance to speak to general saheb, I will ask him: If he had to talk, why did he have our boys and his own killed? I grieve for my son because he was my son but I was told by his officers that he killed 21 Pakistanis before falling. They too were sons of mothers. Why did all of them have to die if General Musharraf had to come here for talks?"

The mother of one of the Pakistanis who died might well have a similar message for Mr. Vajpayee. The question here is not who was to blame for Kargil, but the feelings of the ordinary men and women who pay the price for the permanent state of hostilities between our countries. Thus, they rightfully ask: Why talk after a war, why not ensure that there will never be a war?

Regardless of the outcome of this summit, the one thing we can be proud of is the growing desire for peace on both sides of the border. Let us not forget that the demand for peace, indeed the genesis of the movement for peace in both countries, began not at the level of governments, politicians or generals, but ordinary people, specially women. The women of Pakistan, where a women's movement has grown in strength and influence despite the odds, spoke out for peace and forged links with their sisters across the border. Today this has grown into a much more broad-based movement that represents all sections of our societies. In fact, if one thinks of other arenas of conflict around the world, the India-Pakistan peace movement is exceptional in many ways.

Yet, it is striking that the initiators of the peace effort are those who have known the price of war and the cost of dividing people and nations. Although young people are also involved, they are not there in the numbers one would wish them to be. In fact, in the recent "We, the people" programme, telecast from Islamabad and hosted by Barkha Dutt of New Delhi Television (NDTV), the generational divide was striking. The people being reasonable were older, the young were much more hard-line, particularly on Kashmir.

Thus the desire for peace has to be nurtured in a much more deliberate way in both our countries so that a generation that knows the other only as "the enemy", realises that peace is the only option if both our countries are to prosper.

For today, even if the rock band "Junoon" is popular in India and Hindi films are popular in Pakistan, the young automatically adopt the attitudes that are dominant in our societies.

Thus, if through our media, history books, and in politics, Pakistan is always projected as an enemy nation, most children will grow believing this to be the case.

And as the numbers of those with a direct connection with Pakistan, through family or business, declines, such a sentiment will grow. The fact that the younger members of the audience in "We, the people" came across as more hardline is because they represent a generation that has none of the sentimental links with India that their parents or grandparents might have had. In India, the percentage of the population that has no such link with Pakistan is even greater.

It is doubtful if any of these concerns will feature in the talks in Agra. But for a stable future on the subcontinent, an investment in nurturing the desire for peace is as important as formulating treaties that prevent future wars. And ultimately, governments might consider the latter but the former will have to be done by concerned individuals and groups on both sides of the border, something that is already being done but which will have to be done with much greater imagination and determination.

These sentiments have been summed up most appropriately in the statement issued by the Pakistan-India People's Solidarity Conference in New Delhi: "The resources of the two countries must be transferred from bombs to books, from submarines to schools, from missiles to medicines, from frigates to food, from runways for bombers to railroads for people." Such steps will not diminish us, they will make us stronger.

KALPANA SHARMA

E-mail the writer at ksharma@vsnl.com

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