Peace and Justice

Peace and Justice You can live in an eternal state of peace but you cannot live in an eternal state of war. But perhaps Kashmiri leaders are simply unaware of this historical reality. They want to endlessly prolong their senseless war. Little do they know that, in the course of the Second World War, Japanese soldiers resorted to suicide bombing on a massive scale but that this tactic completely failed. No single ruler in history, no matter how powerful, has been able to maintain a state of continual war over an extended period. How then, one must ask, do the weak people of Kashmir hope to keep up their futile struggle forever? What is bound to happen, sooner or later, is that the Kashmiri militants will one day tire of fighting and will find themselves compelled to give up arms. The right way for the fighting to stop, however, would be for the Kashmiris on their own to decide, willingly and guided by wisdom—rather than out of fatigue or sheer compulsion—to end this destructive war at once. Once, in conversation with a highly-educated Kashmiri Muslim. I observed that what Kashmir needs most desperately today is peace. He replied that they certainly did want peace, but, he asked, what sort of peace? True peace, he said, was inseparable from justice. Peace without justice, he argued, suits the oppressors but not the oppressed. M y r e p l y w a s t h a t t h i s w a s a g r a v e misunderstanding—one that was shared by all the Muslim ‘leaders’ throughout the world. Peace, I said, is defined as the absence of war. This is a correct definition. Peace is not aimed at establishing justice. Rather, peace