Openion

Towards A Culture of Peace

Eduardo Faleiro

What leads human being to kill and maim each other in the name of a higher cause? In the post-cold war era religious extremism is the main source of violence and terrorism. In India self-styled Jehadis have spread death and destruction in Kashmir and elsewhere. Last year Gujarat witnessed massacres of unprecedented barbarism and cruelty not seen during the days of Partition. In Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and several other States thousands of young men and women are trained in the use of guns, thrishuls and bombs. There have been repeated demands for banning the Bajrang Dal and such other militant outfits and dismantling their training camps but the Union Government, has regrettably turned a deaf ear to such demands.

The Charter of the UNESCO opens with the declaration "that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed." It is essential that Education in our schools should include the values of tolerance and objective truth and respect for cultural pluralism. However, the Islamist Parties in Pakistan and the Sangh Parivar in India run innumerable schools which promote ideological indoctrination and hatred of internal minorities and external ‘enemies’. Both control a large network of cultural institutions, literary associations, study circles, publishing houses and such other organisations. Both have an obsession with projecting a martial image of the nation and amassing modern armaments. In Pakistan, students learn that the history of Pakistan begins with the conquest of Sindh and Southern Punjab by Mohammed Bin Qasim in 711 A.D. Thereafter, Muslim invaders from the North East such as Mohammed of Ghazni and kings such as Aurangzeb loom large in the pages of history books. Centuries of the history of this region covered by the Harrapan-Indus Valley civilization as well as the long span of Hindu and Buddhist rule are ignored. In the post Independence period, Pakistan is credited with defining India in 1971 war, General Zia is portrayed as the man of Destiny who set in motion the Islamic revolution, etc. (K.K. Aziz, "The Murder of History"). The Sangh Parivar has similarly made the writing of History a battleground for defining India’s national identity. The historians of the Parivar reject the established theory of the Vedic Aryan migration into India around 1,500 B.C. Accordingly, they claim that the Harrapan-Indus Valley civilization was not Dravidian but a precursor of the Hindu culture with Sanskrit script, sacrificial altars, Vedic history and domesticated horses. On the basis of such "history", the Sangh Parivar categorizes all Indians as outsiders except the Aryan Hindu race and those absorbed into Hindutva fold. The Islamist parties and the Sangh Parivar are indeed mirror of each other. The Parliamentary Forum for Education and Culture, a multi-party platform of Indian Parliamentarians, has been campaigning consistently for a Culture of Peace and against "politicisation" of religion and communalisation of Education.

Religious extremism is terrorism. The struggle against terrorism will lack credibility and effectiveness if it addresses only one form of extremism and ignores the others. There is no clash of civilizations but the conflict is rather between fundamentalisms of all sorts and religion that fosters peace and tolerance. In the United States there are several extremist and terrorist organizations beginning with the Ku-Klux-Klan (now in decline) and including the Militia Movement, responsible for Oklahoma killings. In America the main contention is not between Christianity and Islam but between aggressive Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism.

Poverty is also a major source of strife and terrorism. The Naxalite movement began in 1967 as a revolt against the misery of the agricultural labourers and the social exploitation of the lower castes. The Naxalites are driven by the "ideology of land to the tiller so that any landless or poor person should walk with his head high and talk like a man, not a slave". ("Naxalbari and After", a Frontier Anthology, Katha Shilpa, 1978). Today, several districts of Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh and the tribal belts of Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar are Naxalite strongholds. Globalization has produced great wealth for some but the vast masses particularly in the rural areas continue to live in penury and social discrimination. The present day neo-liberal policies with an exclusive emphasis on growth and disregard for distributive justice will further widen the gap between the haves and have-nots. The anti-poverty programmes of yesteryears are now a thing of the past. If the war on terror is to succeed it is imperative that we confront with a sense of urgency and determination, the twin roots of terrorism, sectarian politics and economic deprivation.