The biggest casualty of unquestioning enthusiasm for war is democracy and rational thought

• This essay is a piece of dissent at a time when dissent may not be welcome.
• There is an air of achievement and competence, a feeling that we have given a fitting reply to Pakistan after pulwama incident.
• Newspapers have in unison supported the government, and citizens, from actors to cricketers, have been content in stating their loyalty, literally issuing certificates to the government.

 Peace needs courage

• One sees an instant unity which is almost miraculous.
• This sense of unity does not tolerate difference.
• War becomes an evangelical issue as each man desperately competes to prove his loyalty.
• Doubt and dissent become impossible, rationality is rare, and pluralism a remote possibility.
• There is a sense of solidarity with the ruling regime which is surreal.
• Thought becomes a casualty as people conflate terms such as Kashmiri, Pakistani and Muslim while threatening citizens peacefully pursuing their livelihood.
• One watches aghast as India turns war into a feud, indifferent to a wider conflagration.
• In this movement of drum-beating, where jingoism as patriotism is the order of the day, a dissenting voice is not welcome.
• But dissent demands that one faces one’s fellow citizens with probably more courage than one needs to face the enemy.

What war feels like

• Sadly, India as a country has not experienced war as a totality, unlike Europe or other countries in Asia such as Vietnam or Afghanistan.
• War has always been an activity at the border.
• War is a trauma few nibble at in India.
• When our leaders talk even of surgical strikes, one is not quite sure whether they know the difference between Haldighati or modern war.
• They seem like actors enacting an outdated play. In fact, one wonders whether India as a society has thought through the idea of war.
• Our strategists, our international relations experts fetishise security and patriotism.
• The aridity of the idea of security has done more damage to freedom and democracy than any other modern concept.
• Security as an official concept needs a genocidal count, an accounting of the number of lives and bodies destroyed in pursuing its logic.
• The tom-tomming of such words in a bandwagon society destroys the power and pluralism of the idea of India as a society and a democracy.
• The biggest casualty of such enthusiasm for war is democracy and rational thought.
• Strategy today has been appropriated by the machismo of militarism and management.
• Sadly, strategy shows that India is moving into a geopolitical trap where China, which treats Pakistan as a vassal state, is the prime beneficiary of Pulwama.
• The Chinese as a society and a regime would be content to see an authoritarian India militarised, sans its greatest achievement which is democracy.
• Peace is not an effeminate challenge to the machismo of the national security state as idol but a civilisational response to the easy brutality of the nation state.

Dissent as survival

• Peace has responsibilities which an arid sense of patriotism may not have.
• Yet we are condemned to conversation, to dialogue, to arguments persuading those who are sceptical about the very integrity of our being.
• Dissent becomes an act of both survival and creative caring at this moment.
• Our peace is a testimony and testament to a society that must return to its civilisational values.
• It is an appeal to the dreams of the satyagrahi and a realisation that peace needs ideas, ideals and experiments to challenge the current hegemony of the nation state.
• India as a civilisation cannot do otherwise.

The Hindu