WARP AND WEFT OF PEACEMAKING AMID VIOLENCE

The Nobel Prize encourages us to think of peace in a broader context. In this imagination, there cannot be a chasm between the regional and the national or international

- 

THE politics of awarding Nobel prizes is sometimes as murky as war itself. This year, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee provided interim relief. It did not award Donald Trump the prize. Instead, it went to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, a person whose slow politics has, in a way, helped birth an organic sense of peace for Venezuela.

The prize to Machado actually raises the question of the creativity of peace in India today. It's in this context that one must raise the issue that discussions about peace and about Gandhian thought have been impoverished for the last three decades.

There have been two exceptions to this mode of thinking. The first has been the thinker Ela Bhatt.

Bhatt has often been seen as the founder of the Self Employed Women's Association and nothing more. But in later years, she was in many senses deeply involved in peace and peacemaking with the likes of Jimmy Carter. She pointed out that peace cannot be worked out of a handbook. It is not a technology. Peace, she said, has to emerge as a metaphysic, out of the local languages, out of indigenous modes of thought.

In this context, she emphasised that Gandhi gave currency to the words satyagraha, swadeshi and swaraj.

She also pointed out that peace has to be a form of storytelling. Without myths, stories, and inspiration of struggles, peace does not acquire the everyday clarity, resonance and poetics it desperately needs.