Cultivating peace

Genuine peace building needs to drive deeper than the external ecosystem; it needs to skill the internal ecosystem to deal with the barrage of assaults. Do schools, colleges or even families do anything by way of skilling for peace in classrooms, within communities or at the dinner tables? Like all good habits, peace must be actively cultivated in every generation or else it frays

- ADITI ROY GHATAK The writer is a veteran journalist and currently the Dean of the Tagore Institute of Peace Studies

It was in 1965 that the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize amidst much brouhaha that did not escape even a class V student that I then was. The award was announced in late October, when we were still not through with the Gandhi Jayanti celebrations. Completing a scrapbook on the Mahatma that was a part of the project, I asked my mother why Gandhiji had not been awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace. After all, he had been nominated five times between 1937 and 1948.

My mother, herself an acolyte of the Mahatma, though not a blind one, satisfied her nine-year-old with a response that may or may not have been absolutely correct, if there ever was a correct answer to this bewildering question. Prefacing her response with "it was a strange omission on the part of the Nobel Committee," she explained that his violent death, in a manner of speaking, negated the value of his lifetime dedicated to achieving peace, as did the enormous violence accompanying the surgical operation of cutting India apart that he could not prevent.

The fact remained that Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of peace in the Indian's eyes, was not necessarily perceived as a peace advocate by the West. He was far more complex; a revolutionary striving to dismantle British rule.

His means may have been peaceful – and nothing but peaceful – but his purpose was enough to throw a spanner in the works in a Eurocentric world, complicating his candidacy in the perception of some committee members.

For those who may have forgotten the circumstances, the omission was publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee, when it awarded the Dalai Lama the Peace Prize in 1989. The chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".