‘Akhand Bharat’

GOODNESS & WAR

“War and goodness are antithetical pursuits inextricably linked to human endeavours and are the primary roots that have propelled the progress of human kind since millennia.” – Col RS Sidhu

 

Gods of Goodness & War

Gods and Goddesses are the embodiment of goodness, yet are selectively adorned with weapons of war. While Goodness has survived eons of warfare, the presence of Gods and Goddesses of war in the religious belief of most ancient civilisations, is a good enough indicator of the pervasiveness of wars since the origin of humankind. Even in India where professing peace is a religious dogma, the idols of the Gods and Goddesses are often adorned with exotic weapons.   Wars, like goodness, just cannot be wished away. Even Lord Ram, the epitome of righteousness, had to participate in wars.

Who Wants Wars?

Maintaining a national environment conducive to enterprise, goodness being integral to it, is the essence of the complete spectrum of obligations of the State towards its citizens. State of war is certainly not conducive to enterprise, so who wants wars?

Wars may be fought to combat an existential threat; orchestrated by competing ideologies; maybe undertaken under domestic political compulsions; but the single most factor identified with war is human rapaciousness, an influence comparable to that of religion.

Who wins and who loses?

In any war the broad stakeholders are the involved countries political leadership, the big business, the military, and the common citizen. Even in a winner takes all stakes, while some losses are apportioned to all the stakeholders, the hardest hit is the military and the common citizen.

Realistic Appraisal

Religions preach universal peace, or should be. But maximum blood has been shed in wars fought in the name of religion.

Similarly, since formation of the UN, maximum combat military interventions have been undertaken by the five permanent members - US, Russia, China, UK, and France - of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the very body responsible to ensure, to use the words of India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar though in a different context, a ‘rule based international order’.

Discourse in the international organisations whether by the permanent members of the UNSC, or in the World Trade Organisation, or while allotting carbon emission goals towards environment conservation, and even for protection of Human Rights, is invariably guided by competing national interests of respective countries. There is simply no place for ethics and righteousness in determining the outcomes and decisions on the world stage.

With the world powers, without exception, pursuing national interests rather than promoting the principle of natural justice, the principle of ‘rule based order’ in reality has degenerated into a ‘two rules order, one for the powerful countries and another for the rest’. Perforce, the failure to limit the combat military interventions is to be laid at the doors of this skewered world order.

Food for Thought

While it may be wishful to abrogate wars from the global stage, increasing the component of peace in the cycle of war and peace is definitely more practical option. Broadly speaking it devolves down to pursuing two pronged strategy.

Any organisation is as good or bad as the human resource working it, so an existential need exists to develop better human beings and evolve more humane societies.

Undertaking structural reforms in the UN and other international organisations are a must to balance the existing skewered international order responsible for world peace.

Goodness and War

For goodness to survive and thrive, it is an imperative for the good people to set away time and resources to ponder over the impact of war. Good people cannot abstain from fighting war, as the only possible way to avoid wars is for the good people to be prepared to fight one.

The path to ‘Akhand Bharat’ shall be the path of both ‘Goodness and War’.