New Dream for South Asia to Give Peace a Chance

India and Pakistan don't need Trump to negotiate peace. We must invest in memories, storytelling and a new pedagogy to make South Asia a theatre of alternative possibilities

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

began thinking about this article on Buddha purnima last week. I realised that Buddha was an ideal peacenik—acute on cosmology and imaginative on civics. He would have been the ideal peacemaker between India and Pakistan. With this thought, I realised the importance of struggling with my own idea of peace, even if it existed in fragments.

In a way, terror emasculates citizenship. The idea of citizenship—one that adopts a critical approach to power and governance—gets emasculated. I sensed that terror distracts. It distorts and displaces. And, in a way, terror also dislocates.

But first of all, terror devalues the human being. It reduces the body to a statistical mortal. The body loses its sanctity and, in becoming a statistic, it becomes an object of contempt. The disappearance of the body is the first act of terrorism.

Secondly, Pahalgam showed that responses to terrorism can become warped. Terrorism demands a machismo of responses, each more devastating than the other. The word to describe it is anthropologist Gregory Bateson's idea of 'schizogenesis'—a process where a society or group experiences increasing divergence and disintegration due to escalating, mutually reinforcing patterns of communication—which leads to a continuous escalation of violence. This leaves no possibility for the redemption of peace.

Terror removes the very nature of rationality. Between fear and irrationality, war becomes an immediate prospect, and Pahalgam was an illustration of that. India's clarity of response only escalated the possibilities of retaliation.