Aheli Moitra
There are two parts to this world. Divided by hundred. One of the two is invested in warfare. This world researches war, hires consultants to get deeper insights and makes a profit of it. It has employed millions, toned a million more bodies and given these, and more, numbers up. War, and conflict, is natural here. In the latest fanfare, much like the Kate and King of Cambridge, Israel refuses to leave Iran’s hand. Even if it means a “30 day” war, it has to be. It has pre-defined deaths. Sophisticated, it touches not the body or mind.
The other of the two worlds is invested in rights. Wars in these worlds are also the obsession of the consultants of the first. What started off as a denial of rights became odd wars, evoking images of blood and gore. Civil wars they are called. People in this sort of a world are mythical, killing each other over race, religion, ethnicity or language. Not as fancy as the Kate and King of Cambridge. And most definitely not “natural”. The sort of war that is silently prepared. And goes by its own law of war. This is the unnecessary war. It touches its people, mutilates them.
Before the “war on terror” began, human beings had already claimed 14,500 wars, alongside 3.5 billion people. That is just recorded history. Till much late into it, the term genocide didn’t exist. The use of sexual violence in war emerged as a crime against humanity only in the 90s. The civil wars had marketed and inflated what had existed as a normal against the feminine. In the “quiet crisis” of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2.5 million people died in the 1990s. More than a decade later, we watched a film on it; our hero now, in sudden retrospect, became their hero too.
The sovereign states, which perceived themselves as aggrieved, fuelled many such wars. Based on the central idea that conflict is real, peace imposed, the first world didn’t mind. It was, and is, more important to defend the territory, the notion. In this way, the Indo-Naga conflict took 2 million lives, reportedly. In this way, over 100 million people died in the wars of 20th century alone, reportedly.
But statistics seem irrelevant. Army rule (as the rule of man) is real, and there is little to be done. Struggles for rights have lived their life. Now peace has to be accepted, or will be forced. Israel can discuss, in open air, its strategies of war, as can Iran. Or the US, China and India. The powerful may discuss the movements and tastes of the proletariat, in disdain, of the community far behind. The man may smirk at the eccentricity of a woman bent on equal rights, or her eccentricity for another raped.
All of the former parties, however, will forgo the right to surprise. The day they find the “civil wars” of the latter have touched and mutilated their breakfast cookie. The day they find the “natural” order of things has favoured the regime of ‘violence for all’. That day, perhaps, the first part and the other part of the world, divided into hundreds, will see the world like the Kate and King. As one big flash of war.
