The recent success of Munnabhai’s Gandhigiri shows that in India the concept of pacifism has long carried with it a moral authority that few pragmatists have managed to dent. When Gandhi successfully used pacifism as a political strategy against the British, he only reinvigorated a spiritualism that was already deeply etched in the popular South Asian psyche. What westward-looking pragmatists have tossed aside as naive, therefore, is exactly that which the middle-class Indian mind has considered enlightened. And while it is true, for instance, that a hit Hindi film — an arguable barometer for popular Indian sentiment — has mostly flourished on a violent eye-for-an-eye formula, there is always at least one high-minded character in these films whose integrity is defined by his or her pacifism and who forms the moral backbone of the plot.

Lage Raho Munnabhai’s Gandhi highlights this quite literally. Keeping this cultural propensity in mind, any government that seeks to win not only the hearts and minds of the moderate majority in India but also their respect must appear capable of delivering constitutional justice on time, building peace internally and externally, and offering leadership that does not prey upon provocative emotional issues for self-serving interests. It is time, then, that our policy makers seriously reassessed the virtues of pacifism from a pragmatic perspective.

Efforts to utilise pacifism as an instrument of persuasion, however, remains incomplete without attempts made to subvert worldviews that valorise vengeance. Pragmatists, who increasingly regard the world in amoral terms, as well as extreme fringes that exploit the ideology of victimhood in order to promote violence, have to be challenged systematically. The roles of poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and hopelessness for the future must be highlighted as the primary causes of violence and crime. Measures necessary to address these issues must be offered as solutions to terror. The war on terror, in other words, should be a war on poverty — one that does not further alienate communities that already feel isolated and marginalised.

... contd.