Peace and Polls

Oct 04, 2010 Editorial

October 2nd was MK Gandhi’s birthday. The Mahatma, or “Great Soul”, has become so indentified with eschewing violence and using peaceful methods to overcome oppression and to generate social change, that in 2007, the UN declared Oct 2nd to be “International Day of Non-Violence”.
Even before the U.N.’s action, Gandhi’s example of peaceful change in a century that had witnessed the snuffing out of at least 60 million lives in various wars, had inspired many.
In 2008, as the soon to be President of the USA, Barrack Obama was approaching the historic, paradigm-shifting elections, he noted: “Gandhi’s significance is universal. Countless people around the world have been touched by his spirit and example – his victory in turn inspired a generation of young Americans to peacefully wipe out a system of overt oppression that had endured for a century, and more recently led to velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe and extinguished apartheid in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of their great debt to Gandhi. His portrait hangs in my office to remind me that real change will not come from Washington – it will come when the people, united, bring it to Washington.”
The following year, ensconced in the White House, when asked by some schoolchildren what person, alive or dead, he would like to dine with, he replied, “I think it might be (Mahatma) Gandhi, who’s a real hero of mine.”
In our own country there have been several events organised to commemorate Gandhi’s birthday, but we believe that not enough attention is paid to the relevance of his message of peace for our country. Peace for us is not an academic aspiration.
As a matter of coincidence (or maybe not?) October 5th – a twinkling removed from the birthday of the apostle of peace – was a signal day for our country in 1992.
After decades of manipulation of the democratic rules for choosing our government, wiser heads prevailed on that day and great expectations were engendered that peaceful change, through the ballot box was going to define our future democratic path.
Alas it was not to be, and in the years since, our long-suffering country has been wracked by violence of every stripe and colour: terrorists, death squads, crime gangs, drug dealers, law enforcement outlaws only suggest the barest outline of the outrages.
The killing sprees have percolated every cranny of the society: the spike in domestic violence, so many ending in murder, reflects the gradual acceptance by wide swaths of citizens that differences can be “solved” by violence.
After three elections since 1992 that have been overshadowed by the penumbra of violence, it is not surprising that there are increased apprehensions of a recurrence now that elections are less than a year away.
What makes our circumstances especially volatile is the nature of our political competition, which unfortunately after more than a half-a-century of retrogression, remains by and large ethnically based. If our own experience and that of so many other ethnically diverse societies is any guide, ethnic political competition here can quickly get out of hand. This is what we certainly cannot afford.
While some may cavil at the quantum of improvement since 1992, none can deny that we have moved forward in spite of the albatross of violence that we have been forced to collectively carry around on our necks since then.
We believe that while the beefing up of the law enforcement apparatus may be necessary to deal with the threat of violence, it is not sufficient. We need to also undermine and ultimately extirpate the now widespread notion that violence is a viable option for dealing with societal and individual frustrations.
We suggest that the Ethnic Relations Commission get its act together – preferably under a more credible Chairman – and work to make the coming year a non-violent one.
The schools, the workplaces, the marketplaces, the clubs must be saturated with the message of non-violent change. The ERC will have to stop being the poodle of any one “side” and work for the good of the entire society.

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