Will Wars bring Peace: A Debate on Convince of Heart and Description of Reality?
War is not a civilized or dignified way to get hold of rights. Because in wars, national development is arrested, education, economy and technology are left backwards, leaders become cruel and unjust, the military is too expensive, and humans become victims.
India and Pakistan, two neighbouring countries, are locked in an unending terrain of stalemate to foster and further the political conveniences. They indulged in eventual wars, conflicts, and military standoffs at this pretext. Consequently, both countries face dismal national development in terms of educational, economic, and technological backwardness. The fiscal resources have been misused in the form of expensive military systems and procurements and unexpected human crisis compensatory exigencies. Even common people have been pushed into the arena of social insecurity. How long it will continue and when will both the nations realize the adverse implications of the politics of “convenience”. If this “convenience fostering” approach based on historical rivalries persists, there won’t be any possibility of establishing a friendly relationship between the two neighbours. Instead, a relationship of hyper-rivalry can crop up, making peace and development a distant dream.
In the contemporary scenario, confrontation and war are not preferred for foreign policy among cultured and progressive nations. It is not a civilized or dignified way to get hold of rights. The disagreement between two neighbours on any issue is not an unhealthy sign of life for their relations. However, when disagreement turns into hostility and conflict into war, it is recognised as an illness that can sooner or later cause an impasse. The death of diplomacy invites a manmade disaster called war, and it ruins their states' biological and cultural wellness or peace. There are strong pieces of evidence for Indians and Pakistanis to understand that wounds of war are still visible on the face of their nations, in the form of deaths, prisoners, widows, orphans, rapes, tortures, intellectual loss, economic loss, technological loss and anything which both countries' need. States cannot feed their citizen's political ego and wishful- thinking. Citizens need peace, security development, and total well-being.
The sixty-five-year life of Indo-Pak relations is ill and hostile because of wars caused by many disputes, significantly affecting the state of Jammu and Kashmir since 1947. They fought many battles to bring peace but invited misery rather than peace. Both states are inflicting pain on the bodies of Kashmiris. These wars have created cultural misunderstandings among the citizens of the two countries. Indians are viewing Pakistanis as Muslims, raiders, terrorists, anti-Indian, lifelong enemies, and Kashmir as an integral part of India. On the other side, Pakistanis consider Indians as non-Muslims (Kafirs), occupiers, imperialists, anti-Muslim eternal enemies, and Kashmir as a jugular vein of Pakistan. This unending hostility has ruined the pillars of peace, and involved states are spending more on wars to create illness and less on strategies of peace to prevent or cure the illness.
Reality describes that India and Pakistan house 20 % of humanity with a mere 5 % of the world's income. Moreover, both states have 45 % of the world's illiterates, with 50 % of all malnourished children. India has the world's most significant number of poor people. In absolute terms, at least 400 million Indians and 50 million Pakistanis live in extreme poverty. India and Pakistan have lost 26,600 soldiers, approximately 50,000 wounded and maimed on both sides, and almost 100,000 families suffered direct human losses during the wars between 1947 and the Kargil conflict of 1999. India is now the 5th largest importer of primary conventional weapons, while Pakistan is the 12th largest. India is spending a huge amount in the name of defence expenditure; in 2011, its defence allocation was Rs 1,64,415.49 crore ($36.03 billion) to meet the needs of military security. By comparison, its 860 million population lives below $2 per day and 500 million live with food insecurity. Due to insufficient and improper health services, the infant mortality rate is 32 deaths per 1,000 live births. Every Pakistani man, woman and child is now indebted to Rs 61,000. The Government of Pakistan continues to borrow additional funds at Rs 500 crores every day of the year. Pakistan’s defence expenditure is Rs 442.2 billion ($5.17 billion) for 2010/11. The situation in Pakistan is alarming, as 127 million people are living at or below $2 per day. The increasing investment in military equipment has had a bad impact on the education and health security of Pakistan. Their current infant mortality rate is 67 deaths per 1,000 live births.
From 1984 to 2009, India and Pakistan spent $5 billion each on Siachen Glacier, with 1,025 and 1,344 deaths, respectively. The critical issue here is that the security of Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi and the whole of India and Pakistan should not be sacrificed at the cost of the Kashmir conflict by using the fanatical political language of an integral part and Jugular vein to Kashmir. India and Pakistan exercised their military mussels to replace one another. This tug of war results in nothing but increased ill-feeling, hostility, violence and poverty among Indians and Pakistanis. It's a ripe time for them to resolve the Kashmir issues, bury the differences, earn profits across the borders, and convert hatred into friendship.
Considering these commonly visible facts and the disadvantages of the war, there is a need to devise strategies for peace. The grey area between war and peace is undiscovered wisdom that we must explore to train our minds to achieve peace. Every average human being desires peace as a state of wellness. It is cherished by those who experience uncured trouble caused by the illness of long-standing conflicts and wars. It’s time for India and Pakistan to work with each other rather than against each other. Wars will never bring peace and security. It is convinced of their hearts rather than an acknowledgement of some mutual meta-realities. Peace can be only maintained by empowering the technique of tolerance and reconciliation through various forms of efficient negotiations and mediation. These peace strategies should be projected as the central part of foreign policy to address the issues, causes, and context of conflict in pre-war situations.