It was in 1965 that the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize amidst much brouhaha that did not escape even a class V student that I then was. The award was announced in late October, when we were still not through with the Gandhi Jayanti celebrations. Completing a scrapbook on the Mahatma that was a part of the project, I asked my mother why Gandhiji had not been awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace. After all, he had been nominated five times between 1937 and 1948.

My mother, herself an acolyte of the Mahatma, though not a blind one, satisfied her nine year-old with a response that may or may not have been absolutely correct, if there ever was a correct answer to this bewildering question. Prefacing her response with “it was a strange omission on the part of the Nobel Committee,” she explained that his violent death, in a manner of speaking, negated the value of his lifetime dedicated to achieving peace, as did the enormous violence accompanying the surgical operation of cutting India apart that he could not prevent. The fact remained that Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of peace in the Indian’s eyes, was not necessarily perceived as a peace advocate by the West. He was far more complex; a revolutionary striving to dismantle British rule. His means may have been peaceful ~ and nothing but peaceful ~ but his purpose was enough to throw a spanner in the works in a Eurocentric world, complicating his candidacy in the perception of some committee members. For those who may have forgotten the circumstances, the omission was publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee, when it awarded the Dalai Lama the Peace Prize in 1989. The chairman of the committee said that this was “in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi”. As for considering the Mahat ma for the award, in the run-up to electing the winner for the Peace Prize in 1948, the Nobel Committee’s adviser, historian Jens Arup Seip, wrote an account of Gandhi’s role in Indian political history after 1937. “… from 1937 up to 1947, led to the event which for Gandhi and his movement was at the same time the greatest victory and the worst defeat ~ India’s independence and India’s partition.”

Today, there is considerable material in public domain about why the Peace Prize eluded Gandhi, even though Seip’s descriptions of Gandhi’s activities during the last five months of his life underscored the profoundness of his ethical impact at home and abroad, concluding that “in this respect Gandhi can only be compared to the founders of religions”. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948, two days before the date closed for that year’s Nobel Peace Prize nominations. The final choice had not been made by then and there was no precedent of posthumously awarding the Nobel Peace Prize, though it was technically possible.

It is entirely possible that geo-politics of the time determined the decision of the committee taken on 18 November 1948, that the posthumous award would be permitted only if the prospective laureate had died after the committee had made a final decision. The committee chose to make a politically correct announcement that there would be no peace award because“there was no suitable living candidate”. The question of peace, within and without, becomes both explosive and implosive in the light of the Pahalgam massacre, especially for the young, more so for the privileged young, who have been protected from life’s trauma in India’s grossly sequestered society.

Those with their youth desiccated by deprivation may or may not find their means of weathering the slings and arrows of fate. Most do not find peace, even those who are seemingly sailing through, which drives home the need for measures to bring one to the need for institutionalising peace thinking. The threat to peace comes not just from armed conflict but from the communal venom that is spewed in its aftermath, just as it comes from economic inequality or environmental degradation, especially in a digital world that is quick to polarise. Genuine peace building needs to drive deeper than the external ecosystem; it needs to skill the internal ecosystem to deal with the barrage of assaults. Do schools, colleges or even families do anything by way of skilling for peace in classrooms, within communities or at the dinner tables?

Like all good habits, peace must be actively cultivated in every generation or else it frays: “To avoid all evil, to cultivate good and to purify one’s mind ~ this is the teaching of the Buddhas.” It may well be argued that India has produced apostles of peace in every age, Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolence as a weapon; militating against narrow nationalism was just aspect of Tagore’s spectacular repertoire of thoughts; Vivekananda preached unity of religions, Abdul Ghaffar (Badshah) Khan mobilised nonviolent resistance among the Pashtuns, a warrior people, because he held nonviolence to be a core Islamic val – ue; the essence of the mystic, Kabir, was that God is within; not in rituals. Probably born to an impoverished weaver family or raised by one, Kabir was completely non-sectarian in his spiritual vision even in the 15thCentury, his voice resonating with both Hindus and Muslims, even as he challenged every kind of orthodoxy.

A question is occasionally asked: with such an iconic legacy is there a need to cultivate peace? To ask a counter question: do the natural laws of inheritance guarantee that a legacy of peace is automatically transferred from one generation to another? In any event, does the presence of peace icons prevent turmoil and trauma? Mahatma Gandhi tried and perished trying to achieve peace. India after Gandhi sought to institutionalise Gandhi but not his teachings, converting him into a face on the currency, as it were. There are peace studies galore today but no efforts to convert peace into a living mission. Children study Gandhi, Buddha, Tagore… but they are rarely taught to live like them. Names, dates, and quotes are memorised for exams, passages are underlined in textbooks, not internalised for life. Peace beco – mes a chapter, not a practice.

 As new experiments to cultivate peace get started, in the city of Tagore for one, it is to be hoped that peace will be extricated from the ivory towers of the academia and its cultivation becomes a part of the soil where the youth play, study, grow and learn. When learning peace becomes an act of co-creating peace through dialogue circles, roleplay, conflict transformation games, empathy mapping, active listening exercises, rooted in everyday life; their own lived experience and those not as fortunate as them. Peace that actually helps them to weather the storms ahead, in the shape of bullying, domestic anger, competitive sport, hatred in the media or divisive politics. The onslaughts are inexorable but, if peace be the path, may it be made inviting for children to walk on it.

(The writer is a veteran journalist and currently the Dean of the Tagore Institute of Peace Studies)

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