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Mandate for a post-nuclear global peace order
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An enduring solution for Kashmir and Partition is possible only within the framework of a subcontinental reconciliation pointing towards an Asian peace order flowing into a post-nuclear global peace order.
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SARAJEVO, JUNE 28, 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the successor to the Austro-Hungarian imperial throne along with his wife Sophie, as part of their fourteenth wedding anniversary, visits Sarajevo for troop inspection. June 28 is a day engraved deeply in every Serb heart. For, on that day in 1389 the Turks conquered the Serbs and ruled over for centuries. Gavarilo Princip, who shot at the archduke and assassinated the couple, was just one of the half a dozen teenagers that were behind the act. The rising Serb nationalism in them just rejected another June 28, another tyranny. The note the group left behind passed judgment and condemned Franz Ferdinand with a single four-letter word and two numerals — June 28. Death to the tyrant.
We may be taking a ridiculously simplistic view of history. But for Sarajevo there would not have been World War I, the Russian Revolution, Nazism and World War II, MK Gandhi and the colonial emancipation, the Cold War, perhaps even September 11 and December 13. And had we had the same actors upon the world historical stage in September and December 2001 as they were on June 28, 1914, World War III would have befallen us extinguishing much of our civilisation and humanity itself.
Warning of Sarajevo
Twentyfive days after Sarajevo, on July 23, Austria-Hungary issues the ultimatum to Serbia to be complied in just 48 hours. It demands the suppression of all reactionary agitation against Austria-Hungary, purging of those who had taken part in them, the tightening of border controls, the outlawing and dissolving of all Serbian nationalist organisations, the arrest and extradition of a list of the involved extremists (who for Serbia were its patriots), and an Austro-Hungarian participation in the inquiry into the assassination.
It was an ultimatum that was intended to be rejected; such was the cry of national honour and war phobia in the Habsburg Empire. The Russian Foreign Minister Sazanov exclaimed to the Austrian Ambassador, "You are setting fire to Europe." The Serbs yielded, accepting all but one condition of the ultimatum; the German Kaiser thought of it as virtual surrender averting war. But the convictions were hardening in Vienna that if war was declared, the Serbs would submit without fighting — a miscalculation that tumbled Europe into the abyss of a world war.
Pre-programmed
The ocean of blood and the lava of hate left behind by World War I virtually bankrupted humanity's moral character and ethical stature, to which the Nineteenth century gave expression through epochal acts like Britain's Reform Bills, abolition of slavery, U.S. emancipation proclamation, 1897 Peace Conference in The Hague for outlawing war itself. But world wars of the Twentieth century not only erased the dividing line between combatants and civilian population but converted war as the agent of total barbarisation of humanity and total destruction of the planet. The Allies, for example, maintained the naval blockade of the capitulated Germany till the end of the Versailles Conference in 1921 bringing about starvation deaths to large segments of the defeated population especially to children and the weak as has happened to Iraq after the Gulf War. The Reparation conditions imposed on Germany so humiliated and devastated the collective German psyche that the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and World War II were pre-programmed and inevitable. And the massive carpet bombing of cities in that war claimed all humanity as ransom for the ever barbarising and devastating war machines — and Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that humanity itself will be erased in a future war.
Both the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force at World War II, to begin with, were banned to bomb civilian targets. On August 24, 1940 German bombs intended for a London oil refinery fell on the City of London and the East End. Churchill, over-ruling the RAF, ordered raids of Berlin the next day. Hitler retaliated by blitzing London — the Battle of Britain. After Pearl Harbour and the U.S. entry in the war, the Allied strength swelled so overwhelmingly that the war aim was hiked towards the irreversible "unconditional and total capitulation." The military drift eliminated every ethical and humanitarian consideration in an utterly brutal and total war. With Europe thus converted to rubble and ashes, the Twentieth century entered its barbaric high noon — 50 million deaths, and the total devastation of the continent. Add to this another 50 million killed, gassed, devastated, exterminated in the Stalinist, Maoist, Korean, Vietnam, Pol Pot war machines and the victims of the countless lesser wars, coups, civil strifes and famines in Asia, Africa, Latin America since World War II. No doubt that the Twentieth century brought us phenomenal material advancements, but it was also a century of earth-shaking barbarisation of human civilisation — Sarajevos, holocaust, Hiroshimas, jehadic terrorisation, September 11 and December 13.
Remember, it is after the eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation and seeing the abyss of hell at the Cuban Missile Crisis that the superpowers moved over to the age of detente and coexistence. December 13 could tumble us into another Sarajevo just by accident or miscalculation as the examples of World War I & II above show. Or it could take us beyond Kashmir and Partition towards a true South Asian joint family. But the wounds are unfathomably deep. Remember, June 28, 1914 avenged June 28, 1389. If so, the wounds of 1947 and 1965 and 1971 contaminate and throw the subcontinent into the abyss of another Sarajevo and Hiroshima certainly tomorrow if not today. This deeply wounded and un-realising subcontinent of ours must be healed, the planet cries for healing and spiritual rebirth after the carnal sins and collective crimes of the passing century as we argue out in our latest book of that title (Minerva Press, London-New Delhi, 2002). An enduring solution for Kashmir and Partition is possible alone within the framework of a subcontinental reconciliation pointing towards an Asian Peace Order flowing into a post-nuclear Global Peace Order. The ongoing plan and process of the U.N. Security Council reform could be broadened towards such new world order agenda by revalidating and upholding the archetypal Indian vision of a `Non-violent and Nuclear-free New World Order' underlying the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan.
India's world historical hour
When we are able to overcome the Kashmir dispute and our Partition wound, the subcontinent emerges as one of the geopolitical corner stones comparable only to the European Union. Such a South Asian Home ipso facto flows into an Asian Peace Order balancing the Sino-Nipponic Houses to the North, and the Arab-Islamic Home of West Asia, ultimately paving way towards a more confederative United Nations, which ipso facto is a cooperative and concordant post-nuclear Global Peace Order. We are indeed mindful of our national mood against internationalising Kashmir. Our hawks blame the doves for their paranoiac fear and incapacity to psychically withstanding the crisis through, the doves blame the hawks by bringing in the witness of history and human folly and fallibility as exemplified in the world wars and Cold War of the passing century. If Kashmir is spared of the boiling point of Sarajevo, much of it is thanks to the watchful international eyes. Like the Berlin Wall, Kashmir for us is the warning and admonition of healing the subcontinent and healing the planet for her spiritual rebirth. From Sarajevo to December 13, 2001, history has completed a barbarous cycle. If we do not guide it towards the millennial vision of its post-nuclear Global Peace Order, Twentyfirst century will slump back again to its own Sarajevo and Hiroshima. We believe it is India's world historical hour. A Pax Indica of the Spirit must now guide the course of history and geopolitics, no less also of a Pax Americana of Hope. Their joining hands leads us towards a Post-modern Project Camelot, the end of which could alone be a millennial and post-nuclear Global Peace Order.
We want and wish our country to rise towards this world historical hour. So we must seriously consider the formation of a `2+5 New Kashmir Commission' combining in it the Camp David, Oslo, Radcliffe models, negotiating on a bilateral Indo-Pak. core but broadening towards a multilateral periphery addressing the long-term issues of the Asian Peace Order and the ultimate Global Peace Order. After the horrors of the Twentieth century, we are at the watershed of humanity's and planet's transformation and spiritual rebirth. It is India's hour in history, Asia's hour in history. For, the Twentyfirst century is the Asian century, as much as the Twentieth was the European century.
V.T. PATIL
Vice Chancellor,
Pondicherry University
&
SRI ASIANANDA
Professor of Philosophy,
IOU (Netherlands)
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