Finding Words for Peace in a Season of War

 And so it has happened.

***

The terrorist attack targeting tourists in Pahalgam lifted the curtain on an eager chorus ready with war cries. Night after night in television studios and on location, they told us about the perfidy of the other side and whipped themselves into a vengeful frenzy, hoping that we would join them. They shouted so every household in the nation could hear them.

Beyond them, an enigmatic government escalated diplomatic measures, such as suspending the Indus Waters Treaty and cancelling visas, and spoke about giving the armed forces operational freedom.

***

Those of us that have spent our lives talking about peace and working towards it, one small task at a time, have watched in horror. We have preached to the choir of our friends and associates—because that is the extent of our reach. We have sat with our words because we have nowhere to put them. Our voices reach no one. We have reflected on how much agency and voice we have lost in the last decade or so. The sense of futility has equalled the horror felt as war-mongering voices have become louder.

***

On April 30, 2025, I wrote on Facebook:

Terror, or indeed any violence, by any actor, state or non-state, is wrong and its consequences are always tragic. The tragedy begins with its immediate victims, lingers in the vengeful anger we feed as we perform outrage and finally, decimates our own humanity--our ability to feel for others and our ability to think.

We can close the door on this by pausing. Feel deeply, but do not equate grief and solidarity with vengeance. Perform grief with care--for those directly hurt, for those indirectly affected. Perform care with thoughtfulness--that considers consequences, that considers who will pay the cost of what you demand, that considers the means more important than the ends.

Responding to violence with violence is always wrong. It always feels like it's now too late for pause, for patience or for dialogue, but it never is. When the chorus mounts, peace seems to be the talk of the weak and witless. But it is when the crisis is most acute that it is time to breathe. It is time to maintain balance. Rising vengefulness is a sign that one is becoming the other, or more truthfully, a sign that one IS the other.

At a time when I feel less confident in my agency as a citizen, I am writing this because my silence would be my failure.

It is Akshaya Tritiyai and I wish you peace. May peace abound--in our thoughts, in our lives and in the world!

***

Today, Indian cities will carry out civil defence drills with air raid sirens and sheltering. For people my age and older, this is reminiscent immediately of 1971.

We shifted school buildings, had two drills a day, ducked under tables, had blackout paper on our windows.

One evening, my father stepped out just before the air raid signal went out. He was on the road when there was a fly-by of Pakistani aircraft. We ran from our flat to our neighbours’ flat to shelter together with them—my great-grandmother, my cousin, my mother, my 1-year-old sister and I. My paternal grandmother came to stay in the middle of the fortnight long war and told us stories to keep us occupied during the blackout.

But nothing ever removed for me the memory of loss. I went to a school where students and teachers alike came from military households. Twice or thrice a day, we would hear announcements about fathers and husbands who had fallen. Those moments of silence remain with me today. They keep me here, writing, so there is no silence about war.

***

These disjointed pieces of writing are what I can manage today, like stuffing paper into the cracks in a crumbling wall, hoping to keep the wind and water out. Not doing even this is worse than its pointlessness.

***

When civilians glorify the military and the sacrifices of those who serve, they also do them a disservice. There is always glory in doing what you have assumed as your duty and there is satisfaction in doing what you think is right. However, when those of us who do not serve, stop at vacuous praise and romanticising militarism, we also abdicate our duty as the people they defend. It is their job to defend and protect. It is our job to protect them by practising restraint, by resisting the temptation to join a vengeful chorus, by holding our leaders accountable for trying every measure and by making sure, their blood is not shed in order to satisfy our egos. The military’s job is to protect us and it is our job to protect them from our own vengeful bloodlust or our leaders’ egotistical vision. Military options should be the last option. The very last option.

In security decision-making, there is little transparency and therefore, there is no accountability. Are we sure that every other option has been exercised?

Most important, have we insisted that every other option has been tried?

***

The problem with terrorism is that it tempts you to insist that only a violent response will satisfy. The truth is we have no patience for the alternative—which short-term may be to press on diplomatically and long-term to understand the appeal it holds. We are also defenceless against those who will goad us into demanding violent reprisal. That chorus is so loud that it sounds like a universal demand. For governments, a violent response is an easy simulation of action—someone else carries it out and pays and you get to say you did this. But nothing really changes.

The fog of war distorts our knowledge about what is going on. Who struck whom? Did they actually hit their targets? Did they hit something else? Were they felled or did they make it back? Very quickly we do not know. And we do not ask because asking is not allowed in times of war (and let’s face it, now also in times of no-war).

The fog of war also obfuscates our real reasons and agendas. Everywhere.

The real impact of this surreal time is on people. Soldiers who die. Families on the border. Families of soldiers. What looks glorious and glamorous at a safe distance is actually a lifetime of grief (mixed with pride for military families), displacement, disruption, disability and a struggle for those at the epicentre.

I am not belittling this sacrifice. I am questioning why we let it happen if there is even a chance it could be avoided.

***

Even when there is no war, life in the border areas is war-like. Over the years, we have seen and read countless reports of schoolchildren playing cricket and landing on mines. We have heard about the military presence in small towns, taking over schools or subjecting people to searches. And yes, there is always a justification for all this.

But really, honestly, truly, is there?

***

I live two lives that are apparently incompatible.

I am a peacenik, peace activist (whatever activist means), pacifist, peace educator—one of those people—you pick your word. In a small measure, this is because even in everyday life, I hate shouting and confrontation. Everyone should just get along and leave me alone. In a large measure, this is because I cannot separate violence and conflict and war from their dehumanising and cruel consequences. This is what is foremost in my eyes. This is who I have always been.

I am also a security studies scholar. This means my professional credibility depends on being and sounding like a peer group of (mostly) men--some of them my friends--who sit in suits, know everything (and everyone) and having spoken of all they know, are convinced of the rationale for war. Decisive action, forceful responses, cool reasoning, realist thinking—all of which add up to understanding and justifying the exercise of coercive power. It takes a generous and confident display of testosterone-driven aggression. 

I came to this field because I wanted to be a more effective advocate for peace. I respect my colleagues for how much they know and for their integrity in speaking their minds. But their conclusions have never become my truth.

***

There is a gender dimension to war. It should be obvious but I will state the obvious here.

Those who were shot in Pahalgam were men. Those who shot them were men. Those who shouted in the TV studios were mostly men. Those who sat in those televised but secret official meetings were mostly men. Those whose op-eds got media space were mostly men spelling out the arguments for a ‘forceful response’ and the very few voices I read calling for restraint were mostly those of women. Those who led the diplomatic effort and pronounced it successful (but still not successful enough to prevent war) were mostly men. Those soldiers who will die in the fighting between the two countries will mostly be men.

Those who were bereaved in Pahalgam were women. Those who are displaced or left behind by war are mostly women and children. Those who are rarely seen as experts or asked about what they think are these women who must live and rebuild their lives after men have decided.

Those who are invisible in all of this are sexual minorities and non-binary persons. They don’t even exist and therefore, need neither consideration nor voice nor protection.

***

On another note, in every ‘ordinary person’ interview on TV, that person has asked for peace and normalcy. Returning to the studio, this has strangely transformed into a rationale for calling for war. Anchors have pranced about exultantly and triumphantly telling us about how we have diminished our neighbour and frightened them and created anxiety.

***

It is in times of crisis that one must stop and breathe and wait. This is the advice one gets for one’s personal life. Don’t make big decisions in times of trauma. This should apply even more to nation-states because the stakes are so much higher. But it does not.

***

Air strikes have already happened and spin has already obfuscated fact. This writing is too little, too late and I know that hardly anyone will read it. But write, I must. When we are all dust and ashes, and perhaps, atomic waste, somewhere in the universe, someone will know—she did what she knew. 

Mea culpa: I too have eaten dinner with Pakistanis

For over a week now, my conscience has been pushing me to write this mea culpa, for I too, have eaten dinner with Pakistanis. Yes, those same Pakistanis that Indian social media insists can never be innocent or trustworthy. Alas, I too am anti-national.

I have not just had dinner with Pakistanis, I have had breakfast, lunch, mid-morning coffee, afternoon tea, anytimeisteatime chai and late night green tea with them. And also, ice cream. I won't apologise, but I do confess.

The first Pakistanis I got to know, although they then were too far away to share any meal, were my Pakistani brother and his family. I did not eat with them until 1985, but I did send the occasional rakhi across the border. In 1985, I visited my brother on his American campus, and stayed with his cousin sister who, as a very hospitable South Asian, fed me. I also ate with him and his many Pakistani friends--dal chaval and pizza, as I recall. But all that was in the US, so it may not count.

In the meanwhile, my uncle visited Ajmer Sharif and came to Bombay just to meet my parents. I was not there but I believe he did not eat anything at our home. This is a terrible thing in South Asian culture, as you know. He did not eat. But many years later, when I visited their home, I ate many meals--lunch, tea, dinner--all specially planned for the visiting vegetarian daughter. A treasured memory remains sitting at the dining table, enjoying delicious apples from Pakistani Kashmir. The apples were sweeter for the affection with which they were chosen for me.

Long before that, my only other South Asian classmate in my MA International Relations course was a Pakistani woman about ten years older than me. She and her husband were both lecturers in Political Science in Pakistan and had come to study in the US. They were shocked (him, especially) that my parents had sent me alone to the US at 20, and adopted me. I ate at their home regularly--yes, usually dinner--when my classmate would cook sabzi separately for me, and feed me dal, subzi and roti early with her two little kids. In her eyes, I think I was not much older! They would make sure I ate--and what did they have that they shared so generously, she was a student and he had a campus job, and they had a relative staying with them too--and then one of them would walk me to the bus stop and make sure I got back to my dorm. They were family. But I am told now, they could not be trusted. So maybe there was arsenic in the delicious firni I ate in their house that I miraculously survived?

You might say, these are 'ordinary' people but it is the security-diplomatic gang one should be leery of. Perhaps. Perhaps.

You see, I have eaten dinner with them as well. Many of the people whose op-eds you read and that you watch on hydra-headed TV discussions are people who were in non-official track, confidence-building programmes with me in the early 1990s. We stayed together for weeks, and ate together, and talked all night, and much more... and confidence was built. And friendships that will last a lifetime. Friendships between people who shared similar experiences, across borders, with sometimes contradictory perspectives--but friendships, anyway.

And the women peace activists I work with now, who have gone from strangers to friends to sisters, who know what sorts of bangles I like and that I want to have a blog about fabric and embroidery someday using photographs of their clothes. The alliances made when eyes meet over shared hurt--one complains, the other consoles, without words. And yes, I am so sorry, many meals have been shared with these terrific women--and a regional buffet of munchies fuels our meetings, where chilgoza meets murukku.

And many other meals all over the world with friends and professional colleagues from the Pakistani side of the border.

I forgot to tell you about the Pakistani fellow-intern from Karachi whose 1971 memories were a mirror-image of mine. But I don't think we ate dinner together, so it doesn't matter.

I meant to write a detailed, chapter and verse confession, but I realise there have been too many meals in over half a century to list here. Also, too many deep and too many silly conversations. Too many books and too many mixed tapes. Too much tea and too much laughter. Tears too, when I first moved to a city where I (still) have few friends, but I could call Islamabad on my cell-phone and share my transition travails with close friends. Too much silliness over international calls made just to get instructions on how to receive faxes on a home printer. Too much water under this friendship bridge.

Mea culpa, even though I do not understand how warmth, love and friendship can ever be anti-national.

Do you think that sharing salt and bread build mutual obligations that keep us from hurting each other? Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that why breaking bread together is a part of spiritual practice? Not eating together preserves the walls between us; Indians have used that as a way of maintaining caste difference over thousands of years.

Do you think that hearing each other's stories reminds us of how similar our struggles are, making it hard to demonise each other? Isn't that a good thing? Is it not a good thing that we get to know each other's frailties from a place of care than of enmity? That we can protect each other?

Isn't communication--over dinner or tea--especially important when you disagree? And a good friendship is not one in which you agree all the time or that you follow slavishly, but where there is enough honesty not to fake all that and enough respect to give each other space to be quite different--but not so much that a helping hand cannot reach.

All my life, I have thought these were good things, and that building the personal ties that keep us from mutually destructive policies was a fabulous idea. I still do. Mea culpa, for that too.

Let me close by sharing with you something a Bangladeshi diplomat said to me during an interview in 1985. I was being clever and asking how he defined South Asia. His brilliant reply: "South Asia stops when you go to someone's house, and the food no longer tastes like home." My South Asian home has many rooms, each quite self-sufficient and separate, but our dining tables merge under the force of that common civilisational instinct to stuff people's stomachs to the point of stupor--and food across the region tastes of spices and condiments we have traded across millennia. Wherever I move, across this table, whoever I break bread with, I am still eating at home and that is how it feels.

But have it your way--so, mea culpa.

Book Review: Women and militarism in Pakistan

Reviewer’s revelation: I have known the author of this book for over two decades.

I bought my friend Aneela Zeb Babar’s book We Are All Revolutionaries Here as soon as I heard about it—one of the first copies SAGE sold, I think?!—because I know Aneela is a very lively writer and an insightful observer of the everyday realities that make up a social moment. Now, I often buy books enthusiastically and then they sit on my bookshelf for years, waiting for that project which would call for them. Aneela’s, I actually have read right through!

The rate of growth of new subfields in security studies is directly related to government investment in their propagation. A couple of years ago, there was a conference in Washington DC on ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ or CVE. In two year, investment in conferences and research projects has grown apace to generate a minor library of studies that largely recycle the same information—a portion of government perspective, a portion of UN/INGO values, a little nod to empiricism and recommendations, directed at anyone who will listen. I know this because I have had my moment with this, having researched and written a short background note on women and CVE last year.

Into this discursive moment, enters Aneela’s book, a compilation of work done meticulously over a decade or longer, reminding us of the kind of research that actually builds knowledge.

What is this book about? Aneela writes about one of the most-discussed puzzles of our time—what draws people towards worldviews that seem extremely radical and even irrational to others of us? She approaches this question with an open mind and heart, and writes with an honesty that allows us to walk with her. We are in those classrooms and living rooms and offices and discussion groups that she attends, hearing people speaking about what faith has come to mean for them and how it enjoins them to live—not as diktat but as choice. The researcher listens with empathy and writes critically.

One of the charming features of Aneela’s writing is that she blends the personal with the external narrative allowing us to understand her location and her baggage.

The first chapter is about madrassahs and the new hybrid seminaries. Outside Pakistan, we get to read about madrassahs but how many of us know about these new institutions that anchor contemporary curricula in religious education? Graduates enter a variety of professions but share “religious values and a network of contacts” (page 34). These networks are emerging as significant and Aneela suggests are an end in themselves. But students grow up with religious—essentially, status quo—values so deeply ingrained that this schooling deprives “their students of the will to change or challenge all that is flawed in Pakistani society.” There is no reinterpretation or will to resist the challenges that face state and society. Rather than engage with these challenges, young people are choosing to express their values through consumerism of a particular sort.

Aneela’s second and third chapters describes a world many of us will never enter—the world of expatriate Pakistani women and their rediscovery of faith and a faith-based identity. She writes specifically of women she has interviewed in Canberra and the influence of Farhat Hashmi’s Al Huda, an organisation that offers religious lectures and seminars for women. In this world view, the “intrusion of women into the public sphere defined as the ‘men’s area of control’ is seen as leading to the disruption, if not the destruction, of the fundamental order of things” (page 53). Dress, and veiling, are of importance to this discussion. The chapter allows us to hear how women see their own journeys to faith and why this leads them to make the choices they do. More than anything, it takes that amorphous image of veiled, devout women in a mass and turns them into individuals who, we learn, have thoughtfully made choices. Aneela closes her second chapter by pointing out that before the Intefada, few Pakistani women wore the veil but that they now do, may ironically signal that women are part of public life (page 74).

The third chapter, which describes Al Huda’s apparoach and work, is also interesting for what it shows you about gender and class relations in Pakistani society. Drawing women away from frivolous pastimes into religious education and then social service (page 88) without upsetting the patriarchal applecart (page 90), is what Al Huda sets out to do. What sort of social service is not discussed here but it is safe to assume it would not be a social change agenda that disrupts traditional equations.

With the madrassas and hybrid schools as well as Al Huda, Aneela points out that there is a homogenizing drive—a simplification of interpretation, an erasure of ethnic, linguistic and maybe theological difference. In her style, she then draws the narrative to herself and underscores what is lost when such essentialism takes over. What she writes about Islam in Pakistan is also true of other faiths in other places.

In ‘Texts of War,’ Aneela shows us that when militarism is deeply entrenched in a society, carrying guns is a common dream among young women as well as men. This chapter literally wanders through the rooms of this reality—with a literature review on the role of the military, its relationship with religion, women in the military and media representations thereof and the mirror image of all this in a society where girls and boys receive a religious education. Where does Pakistan’s only female Prime Minister fit into this picture? “Yes, we did salute her but you have to understand that the elation was not there in the heart of the soldier,” an officer told Aneela (page 122). Interviews with teenagers conducted in 1999 form a part of this chapter.

Ten years ago, almost to the date, the Pakistani army laid siege to Lal Masjid, which along with the attached Jamia Hafsa madrassa had come under the sway of a pair of militant brothers. In that siege, 154 were killed.  Aneela uses eyewitness and first-person accounts to narrate what happened from the perspective of those within the walls of the complex, many of them young girls. In fact, the chapter is largely made up of the translation of one such account by Umme Hassan. The polemics of this account showed that the young women had thought about issues beyond defending the mosque but they were not, Aneela tells us, feminist because they continued to reinforce “traditional, static and unchanging articulations of Muslim women” (page 167).

This book allows us to peer over a neighbourly wall and to eavesdrop on conversations that women are having about life, world and faith, and inevitably, politics. We get to meet the women that do not attend Southasian track two programmes or seminars and we are privy to their journeys. Aneela tells us that we will see a “more firebrand generation of young women” (page 170). When we do, this book will remind us of the influences that shaped them and our time.

Coming back then to this idea of ‘extremism,’ what this book allows you to see is that there is nothing really extreme about it when you are inside that society, on your journey. It is your evolution, seeking answers for your life and following those answers logically. To understand is to justify, and that is one reason to other that which threatens what we hold dear, but without understanding and empathy, can we resolve? Will there be a solution to the violence of this historical moment that is not rooted in understanding and empathy—that you feel as you do because of where you come from and what you have been through, and what you believe is what allows you to make sense of your life? I don’t know. But reading Aneela’s book allowed me to look long and hard and try to learn something about a world that is just outside the limits of mine, but finding its way into my backyard as well.

My big complaint with this book is that it could have been better edited. It is the writer’s prerogative to spill words on a page and the editor’s job to clean, sort and craft them into a higher form of her art. The result is an absorbing text that is sometimes stream-of-consciousness—you get the gist but cannot find the point—or a structure you can recapitulate or argument you can summarise. For a work that is so unusual and important, the apparent absence of editorial engagement is a big setback.   

You can read this book for many reasons. You can read it to learn about what women’s lives are really like in Pakistan and what ideas about masculinity and femininity are now circulating. You can read it for the insights it offers into “radicalisation” and extremism, especially how the state becomes complicit in this process. You can read it for the many stories and anecdotes it is built around, which allow you to visit Pakistan in a way that other academic writing will not. You can read it for the meticulous research that is reported (like translations of original literature, for instance). You can read it because it’s a really good example of feminist scholarship and writing—in its approach, its transparency. But really, if you pretend to have an interest in gender, Pakistan (or Southasia) extremism or social change, you should read this book.

PS: Aneela, please review my review kindly!