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.
My reply was that this was a grave 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 is aimed at creating the necessary conditions for working towards securing justice. And this, I said, was in accordance both with reason and with Islamic teachings.
When the Prophet Muhammad entered into a peace treaty with the pagan Quraysh of Makkah at Hudaibiyah, he secured only peace, not justice. However, this peace then created a normal, peaceful environment that enabled the Prophet to work and secure justice as well. This clearly shows that justice is not an integral component of peace. Rather, justice can be secured only after peace is established, by using the opportunities that peace provides. It is not a direct and immediate product of peace.
The leaders of the Kashmiri militant movement constantly argue that they want the Kashmir issue to be resolved in accordance with the resolutions of the United Nation’s Security Council. In other words, they insist that a referendum be held in Kashmir to decide its political future.
This stand proved to be invalid both legally and logically when Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of United Nations, declared during his visit to Islamabad that this resolution of the United Nations had now become irrelevant.
However, apart from that I will say something in principle: that one can secure one’s rights only on the basis of one’s own strength and not on the basis of another’s power. It is simply unrealistic and wishful thinking to expect that the United Nation’s resolutions will be acted upon in one’s own favour.
