Peace through Education

Man’s greatest faculty is his ability to think rationally. It is said that man is a thinking animal. Reading fiction can be a source of enjoyment, but if we want to bring about a revolution in a person’s life, we shall have to state our facts on the basis of established knowledge and rational analysis. This is the only way to bring about a revolution in a person’s thinking. Nothing less than an intellectual revolution can effect any real beneficial change in human life. Building a peaceful society requires the re-engineering of the mind. This task can be carried out only through education— more through informal education than formal education. By informal education, I mean gaining knowledge through the media, literature, seminars and conferences, dialogue and discussion, and so on. Here, I am not just theorizing about peace: I have experimented with it in practice. The venue of this experiment was Kashmir. I have been working towards inculcating peaceful thinking among Kashmiris since 1968, and I am still continuing with my efforts. There has been a sea-change as a result of this movement, and now, in almost every house in Kashmir the peace-promoting literature of our mission is read. In 2011 we organized a meeting of those Kashmiris who are acquainted with our ideas. On this occasion, someone representing a group of Kashmiris said in the course of conversation: ‘We have travelled a long way from October 1989 to October 2011. Formerly, we used to throw stones