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Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
Panchsheel—Pathways to Peace
Cultural alienation often finds expression in cultural aggression. Rarely in human history have truly cultured nations violated the civilisations, cultures, and territorial integrity of other peoples. They in fact, imbibed instead the salient aspects of the other cultures and made these a part of their own. However, now within the materially developed countries, under the pressures of the market place, culture is being transformed into an aspect of the economic activity, and consumption becomes a cultural expression thus blurring the distinction between culture and economics or the metaphysical and physical. And the most uncivilised and brutal manifestations of violence, wars, genocide, and terrorism are now being defined as symptoms of a 'Clash of Civilisations'.
Colonial exploitation was projected as a civilising mission, so also was evangelisation. Nowadays, democracy and human rights, as practiced within the so-called civilised world, are served by bombing thousands of women and children and destroying their civilisational heritage. All this may be enriching a few war-mongers, arms dealers or oligarchs, but for most of the human family the visible effects are the dead, wounded, maimed, orphaned and displaced humans. And the helpless victims of this violence cannot understand why the entire structure of their lives is being disrupted, while the rest of the world wonders who is next in line for such a civilising treatment. All this is happening because some people are living under a delusion of power which, when divorced from reality is more dangerous than power itself. The tragedy is that individuals and nations do not learn lessons from their past misadventures and while such delusions are transmitted from one generation to another, those tragedies become a historical process. Yet history, even the most recent one, is replete with examples of failed states and economic power systems. Today we see the acquisitive desperation of some countries being expressed in each one of their violent acts, overt and covert operations.
Mahatma Gandhi tried an alternative and employed all the politico-economic, ethical, moral and spiritual potential of the nation's arsenal to prepare the Indian people for non-violent action against a colonial power. In the end, while the country was liberated with goodwill, the ethnic and religious conflicts built into the system by the rulers led to its breakup. In this process, thousands lost their lives and millions were displaced and had to restructure their lives. The colonial and neo-imperial powers are now resorting to more and more deadly violence to bring the world's energy and economic systems within their control. To achieve this they have set other nations and their elites on the path to an illusion of prosperity and wealth, behind the world's richest and most powerful country which is in fact an increasingly fragile, insolvent, armament-protected and saturated consumerist state, burdened with growing unemployment, a bankrupt economic system, rising differentials of incomes and wealth and diminishing welfare for the poor and the aged. To the developing world this attempt to imitate the imposed role model means re-culturation around an affluent consumer elite and the creation of a network for the transfer, through various market mechanisms of the value-added financial surpluses to central control points of the international financial system, in a context of growing mass deprivation.
One of the most explosive problems facing the world today is unemployment. And even many amongst those who are employed, consider their repetitive and mechanical work only a means for survival. Most of the developing countries are now being pushed on the same consumerist path and their very development is made subservient to the imperatives of the developed world.
In other words, large numbers of people of the developing world are being made to forsake their own opportunities in the agriculture and rural context, and forced to seek employment within the high cost and highly competitive new technologies in the urban international system; wherein compulsions towards automation and robotisation are constantly reducing the potential for employment. Downsizing the work force has become one of the key factors for survival within the globalising market economies. The consequences of these processes are that more and more people are being attracted to the urban areas while at the same time technologies are reducing the possibilities for employment. Another factor is that while a productive job could be created in the rural system for an amount equivalent to US$200-500, a job in the rapidly automatising small, medium and large-scale industries and services within the urban system calls for US$10,000-1,00,000 per person. Such "capital intensive" employment is outside the abilities of the developing world to sustain for their large unemployed population.
Another trend is to centralise marketing through large department stores, which deprive small traders and family businesses of their livelihood. This is a dangerous policy in that it further narrows the circle of welfare in the developing world.
To support the consumerist model, the education system—instead of training people on how to work in modernised agriculture, or better organised rural industries, health, education, and other services or needs—is being tailored to its compulsions. And masses of students are left under the imported illusion that their best chances lie in becoming cogs in computerised mills or in financial services as Masters of Business Administration because that is where the big money flows and that is where they see their long-term future. Innovation in productive and appropriate new sciences and technologies to meet local needs is being most often sacrificed in order to meet the needs of big business sectors which offer alluring but limited high value employment potential.
Advances in high technology, artificial intelligence, and research and development of new weapons are supplying the stock in international trade and some of the most sought-after areas of employment for high technology graduates. Consequently the entire education system of most countries is following a pattern where far too few are being trained to enhance their own self-employment capabilities, in terms of the local needs, priorities and resources. As a result many who harbour the illusion of riding the bandwagon of high income jobs are being dropped by the wayside. No sophistry or jugglery with figures can explain away the evidence of mounting deprivation and resulting terrorism worldwide which all the weapons in the superpower armoury are unable to contain. This is also bringing about a change in the relationship between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. It is spreading the lowest form of consumerist culture and the rapid regression of high culture, aesthetics, arts, and spirituality along with decline of the related value structure. In the shadow of the expanding tribe of billionaires, hundreds of millions of people are becoming victims of acute shortages of food, water, education and health.
How long will such a system survive? All other options are being fore closed and the consumerist paradigm is being promoted as the only route for development within a globalising market. The big money machine is creating illusion of wealth and employment through a profusion of consumer goods and glittering entertainment for the elites in the midst of global chaos which fosters the use of weapons of mass destruction with increasing frequency. Tragically not only nation states, but even major civilisational states like India, China and Brazil are being carried away by this trend. The question is how to reverse it. To that effect, the ambitions of the war-mongers and the oligarchs have to be curbed in order to create a peaceful environment, within a multipolar, multicultural world, promoting harmonious coexistence.
For the last many years we have been hearing of coalitions to wage war and to fight (or spread) terror. It is now time to create coalitions for peace, and to draw a new guide-map to the path of universal welfare. The coalition for peace must also be the coalition of the nations which can singly or collectively stand up to any threats of socio-politico-techno-economic sabotage and subversion of their security. Thus the only hope against such unrelenting attacks on sovereignty is that a number of powerful nations such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) should take upon themselves the responsibility of declaring their adherence to an agenda of peace and prosperity for all.
Half a century ago, two of the largest countries in the world, China and India endeavoured to apply some of the ethical and moral values within their cultures to regulate the relationships between states based on the five principles of Panchsheel:
Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty;
Mutual non-aggression;
Mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs;
Equality and mutual benefit: and
Peaceful coexistence
To mark this anniversary, a recent conference in Moscow gathered policy-makers and scholars from Russia, China and India to reflect on the relevance of the five principles in the current global situation and to lay out prospects for trilateral cooperation and mutual support. It is a time for those who are fostering this violence and terror around the world to reflect on how they have been flouting everyone of these rules and many more. How long do they think that they can keep the world in such a straightjacket and transform billions of people to conform to and serve their interests? Implicitly Panchsheel is an attempt to get close to what is universally held sacred; because when their sacred centres are lost, civilisations fall apart. The answer should be clear to all those not blinded by arrogance, the killing instinct and the lust for power.
J.C. Kapur
New Delhi
December 2004