Why Patriotism Is No Substitute For Morality

With terror strikes repeatedly, internal and external security discourses get combined. To maintain the idea of democracy in a militarised situation, the nation needs a futuristic framework

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

Here is something eerie about the reportage on our recent confrontation with Pakistan. The entire battle is presented as a strategic or gaming technique. Some news presentations share similarities with academic conferences. It is almost as if a war is presented with human interest elan.

The policy presentations are seen plurally—one minister is presented as an intellectual, another as emphasizing the political. Yet another becomes a deeply prophetic character in articulating defense as an immaculate conception. There is an impoverishment here. Patriotism is presented as a kind of moral rearmament while the entire debate takes place without any ethical framework. War is seen more as a gaming technique than a set of ethical choices.

A critique of such a situation cannot be presented in the framework of party politics—a clash between the regime and the opposition. It needs to be viewed within more holistic frameworks that transcend the parochialism of current politics. One of the suggested heuristics is to view it in the framework of futuristics.

The concept of the future articulates both ethical possibilities and the idea of alternatives. Futures as an academic domain helped articulate a critique of communist regimes. Futures as a framework now presents the moral possibility of seeing it in terms of a more plural domain where ethics, politics and strategy combine to create a set of decision-making frameworks. The idea of futures lets us go beyond the immediacy and parochialism of today's interest, into the articulation of what would be good for India a decade hence.