Opinion - News Analysis

Peace: a God-given birthright

Swami Agnivesh & Valson Thampu

Events in Gujarat and the palpable tension on the Indo-Pak. border have awakened an unprecedented thirst for peace in our society. As a rule, we learn the value of something only when it is in jeopardy. Slavery deepens our longing for freedom and sickness makes us hanker after health. The flower of peace blossoms in the desert of war. Peace is the essence of spirituality and there is no religion that does not exalt it. Sadly, though, religious communities continue to traverse the path of conflict and cruelty. This betrays the growing gulf between religious communities and their scriptural heritages.

Spiritually, peace is integral to creation; peace is the medium of growth and creativity. It is not something that people have to contrive or invent. In contrast, it takes a deliberate act of will and enormous efforts to ruin peace and create a climate of hate. The spiritual insight is that peace is a by-product of perfection. Perfection is a state in which the world is centred on God. ``In his will,'' wrote Dante, ''is our peace.'' It is when the atman attains its oneness with the Brahman that the fever of life is transformed into the bliss of peace.

War, in contrast, is a bleeding testament of the flaw in human nature and the scheme of things shaped by it. We cannot welcome or enjoy the fruits of perfection, such as peace and fullness of life, so long as we are rooted in imperfection. Good fruits cannot come out of evil trees. Hence, often, the quest for peace fumbles into war-mongering. Because the world's quest for peace is undertaken on the foundation of imperfection it is riddled with a glaring contradiction: the assumption that wars make this world safe for peace. There is as much sense in this dogma as there is in believing that fire heals burns, or salt quenches thirst. It is a myth, handed down through generations, that the enemy of peace is lurking out there, somewhere.

No, the enemy of peace is within each one of us. It is not a force, but a state of alienation from God that makes us mistake each other as enemies, the enemies of peace. The ultimate proof of our alienation from God is our readiness to wage wars and spill blood in the name of God, which is the ultimate insult to the majesty of God's compassion. The second problem with the world's quest for peace pertains to the cost of peace. Peace, like war, has a cost. That's fine; but who will pay this cost? While we are willing to make enormous sacrifices for war, we are unwilling to make even small concessions for peace.

Millions of people dying for war are deemed glorious and valorous. But even one person dying for peace is felt as abnormal and unacceptable. Jesus came to die for peace. Only God, it seems, is willing and able to meet the cost of peace. The reluctance to meet the cost of peace oneself breeds the eagerness to exact its price from others. War is the name of this dishonest and dangerous game. War is a mechanism by which those who cannot help it are forced to pay the price, presumably, for peace. In reality, though, wars are launched by the ruling elite to fortify their class interests. The ruling elite arrogates to themselves the right to exact from the rest of the society the cost of an idealism that they themselves are cynical about. The fact that a political leader exhorts the soldiers to make the ultimate sacrifice does not mean that he will be forthcoming sacrificially either in war or in peace.

The cause of peace will take a giant stride forward when people see through the hollowness and mendacity of such rhetoric. If wars could have secured peace, nuclear wars should have been, logically speaking, a windfall for peace. But such a thought is sure to attract violent condemnation. The reason for this is not far to seek. Weapons of mass destruction make wars impossible simply because they extend the cost of war also to the elite, whereas conventional wars afflict mainly the poor. In the event of a nuclear war, the rich not less than the poor, the powerful not less than the powerless, face extinction. It is estimated, for instance, that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, at their current levels of weaponisation, could result in the instantaneous death of 12 million people.

It is time we called the bluff on the hypocritical dogma that wars can unravel the riddle of peace. They don't, and they never have. It is only a spiritual regeneration of our society and nation, our collective return to a godly way of life that can prepare us for the dawn of peace. The fact, in the end, is that peace is a God-given gift that mankind has been, all through history, robbed of by powerful vested interests. As long as we go on mistaking these war-mongering apostles of peace for our saviours we shall be, albeit unwittingly, a party to waging war on peace. Peace is our God-given birthright, and not the alms that politicians distribute in a bid to play god in history. The fundamental duty of every peace-loving person is to question the dogmatic assumption that war is a necessary and unavoidable arbiter in the affairs of nations.

If today war seems indispensable it is mainly because, over the centuries, a near-universal faith in the exclusive efficacy of violence has been fostered in the outlook of the world. From the beginning of times, except in the sphere of the spiritual evolution of our species, only the love of power and not the power of love has found free-play in the affairs of men. We shall continue to despair of the prospects for peace as long as a culture of power continues to shape the outlook and agenda of the world. A country as rich as India is with religious and cultural diversity has much less excuse than the other nations of the world for shifting from her native foundation of peace and ahimsa to belligerence and war-mongering.

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• Semantics of war and peace
• A happy Cannes
• Vajpayee as a wartime leader
• Dalit, OBC and Muslim relations
• Peace: a God-given birthright
• Return to talks
• Stop jingoistic cries
• Settle the issue
• Deal separately
• Involve Kashmiris
• Speech not new
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