The Culture of Peace : The Experience and the Experiments
The IGNCA Asian Conference New Delhi, 15-29 November 1996.
There are a large number of national and international organizations concerned with peace. The United Nations is the main political forum for world peace. Peace-making and peace-keeping are its core functions. The Unesco, which is an organization of states within the United Nations, has held meetings in Barcelona in 1993 and 1994 on the Contribution of Religions to the Culture of Peace. Peace is still a dream. Violence is unleashed all over, particularly in Asia, Africa and eastern Europe. The dialogue on peace must continue. The practical way of living peacefully must be found.
The IGNCA Conference on peace was launched on the 25th November 1996, the full moon of Kartika, the lunar month of Indian calendar, when the people of India were celebrating Guru Nanak’s 527th birth anniversary with orthopoiesis. It was dedicated to the memory of Srimati Indira Gandhi, the first woman Prime Minister of India, the noble martyr who gave her life for the cause of harmony and peace, and had a very profound understanding of the concepts and goals of peace. She had said,
Development, independence, disarmament and peace are closely inter-related. Can there be peace alongside nuclear weapons? Without peace, all our dreams of development turn to ashes. No peace today, no life tomorrow.
She believed that peace was not merely the absence of war but (in her own words) “active co-operation to work for survival and progress, to keep alive the hope, and to provide opportunity for the unfolding of the human personality.”
The Conference was planned with the intention of (a) sharing the experience of beauty and peace: to situate the place of experience (sensual, intellectual and spiritual) in a culture of peace; to provide a dialogic orientation in peace together with musicians, painters, poets, dancers, creative genius and spiritual leaders; and to foster the act of faith and goodness; (b) working towards the moral basis of experiments in peace: to learn the art of living grounded in peace; to live responsibly and lovingly together on earth; and to foster the philosophy of peaceful and creative coexistence; and (c) forming the network of actors in peace: to promote a culture of peace through spiritual vision of shared human responsibility; to impress upon the people of the world that happiness cannot be achieved unless everything is grounded in peace; and to find out a true alternative to the political economics of peace.
An impressive group of participants from Bangladesh, China, India, Iran, Japan, Russia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, U.S.A. and Vietnam addressed itself to the matters of healing and building world peace. The great importance of the Conference lay in the presence of so many eminent personalities: Gandhian scholars, peace researchers, educators and actors in peace, religious leaders, spiritual luminaries, philosophers, poets, painters, artists, choreographers, musicologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, indologists, and others coming from different cultural traditions and background.
Although this Conference was in a certain sense a renewal of the Barcelona dialogue, its framework was different. Here the emphasis was not on evaluating religious role from the point of view of the so called objective sociology or anthropology. The IGNCA Conference set the tone for developing a holistic perspective in the culture of peace. The learned participants reflected on all such aspects of life that make a new culture of peace. Eg. “cosmos and humanity as a healing family”, “true meaning of peace from Chinese literary perspective”, “truth goodness and beauty”, “creative, hence a peaceful society”, “artistic appreciation as the key of the culture of peace”, “peace as theatrical experience”, “theatrical performance on peace”, “experiencing peace while engaging in experiments founded on morality”, “Buddhism and the culture of peace”, “crisis of faith; excessive greed”, “modernity and individual responsibility”, “cornerstone of peace found within the Bahai teachings”, “enlightened souls and universal peace; Sufi paradigms of peace making”, “contribution of Indian Sufis to peace and amity”, “man in his becoming”, “the illusion of seeking peace”, “Buddhist art a peaceful mission of culture”, “Vipasana and the art of peaceful”, Gandhian vision of peace”, “experience of organizing the peace movement”, “Odyssey of peace”, “vision of culture of peace versus materialism and consumerism”, “the UN and permanent peace”, “networking of actors in peace”, “the self-organizing centres and networks of peace in the tradition of India”, and so on.
The IGNCA Conference supported the 1994 Barcelona Declaration (see Vihangama Vol. II No. 3 Oct.-Dec. 1994). There was no need to come out with yet another declaration on peace. But what came out at the end of this Asian Conference was a significant observation:
Peace is reality. War, the opposite of peace, is unreal. Both are intrinsically built into the cosmic design, as are darkness and light, hot and cold, and all such conceivable and inconceivable opposites.
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