Call For Ahimsa

K.R. Narayanan - x-President India

2004-10-08T13:10:00.000-04:00

A spontaneous message from K.R. Narayanan, India's former President, on Gandhi's birth anniversary.

October 02, 2004

Dear friends,

I am glad to offer my full support for the Worldwide Ahimsa movement launched today, October 2nd, 2004.

I am hopeful the movement will gather momentum all over the world.

With warm regards,
Yours sincerely,
(Signed)
(K.R. Narayanan)

Krishna Kumar, Dir.Education India

2004-10-08T08:54:00.000-04:00

Krishna Kumar, the new Director of Education in India (more precisely, of the NCERT or the National Council of Educational Research and Training) writes:

Dear Friends,

I have taken longer than I had promised to respond to your appeal, but I have held it constantly in my mind. As I said to you over the telephone, I fully support the effort and its goal, but I do have problems with its present speed and methodology. I hope that on both of these aspects there is hope for further thought and improvement. I have seen numerous remarkable efforts die down after a short, luminous life – something not at all surprising in our age of disposable, consumer merchandise and fast-moving, busy people who provide the role model for the young.

Many of the things you have mentioned in your appeal are related to these civilizational features of modernity, and you are quite right in saying that these are the core of a violent culture. We are stuck so deeply that at times it looks as if the time required to contemplate on ways to get out will not be available. Gandhi’s life and ideals, and the lives of those who continue to live for causes that Gandhi might have approved, do inspire us, but inspiration is not enough; nor is guidance, nor is a move to get together adroitly, without a long-term perspective. Many documents are released these days with dozens or hundreds of signatures of important people, and quite often these documents only contribute to the greatness of these people by making them more visible and look effective, i.e. if the document gets the attention of those who wield power. I have no doubt that the appeal you have released will get the support of a lot of well known names of our times. Should that make us feel good? The appeal must evolve over a sustained period of time by receiving contributions from people who are neither visible nor important, and that is something for which the technology you have decided to use for mobilization may prove good for the so-called developed societies and certain sections of the society of Third World societies. I hope you will agree that the appeal will have greater impact if it becomes a means of world-wide mobilization of minds, especially young minds, and that process should not be restricted to the facilities that cyber technology provides us.

The appeal in its present form and the telephone conversation we had give me the feeling that we want something to happen by January 30 of the coming year. This kind of deadline does worry me because I know that when deadlines act as a driving force, the quality of the effort suffers. And indeed, it is not for nothing that pre-set dates for completion of an act are known as deadlines, for they prevent us from drawing a wide time-horizon from guiding our life and action. I would like to see the appeal for January 30 being observed as Ahimsa Day becoming a living line which will attract and compel millions of people over the coming years to probe the roots of violence and the rocky obstacles that peace confronts in just about every sphere of life, including education. Over the last few years, since the publication of my book, Prejudice and Pride, I have become acutely aware of the relentless contribution that systems of education makes to the culture of violence. All of us who are involved in children’s education in one or the other must introspect how our energies and efforts can be diverted towards the goal of releasing the potential that human beings have for living in peace.

I hope to see a somewhat larger, but less wordy draft of the appeal evolving as a result of our collective reflection on the initial version.

With best wishes and regards,

Yours sincerely,
Krishna Kumar

Petition Text

2004-10-07T20:07:00.000-04:00

Call for "Ahimsa Day", an International Day of Non-Violence, on every January 30th - starting 2005.

In a world torn asunder by battles for wealth, power, glory and revenge, a gentle voice was raised early this year, asking for the madness to stop. Their heads in the clouds, young children from various lands – who were at the International School of Paris but could have been elsewhere – may indeed have had their feet firmly on the ground. With childlike faith in the sanity of most human minds, they resolved to send a call to women, children and men across the world to suffer no longer through the catastrophes wrought upon them by those waging the deathly battles. Flying in the face of 'reality', they began imagining ways in which life on earth could be made more beautiful. Working on Attenborough’s film "Gandhi" in a language class, girls and boys from different countries set about talking sense in hesitant English. Not the first, nor last, to wish or work for a better world, they did come up with an interesting idea. First of all, they felt, everyone needed to take a day off. To stop and think over whether the grown men who run the affairs of the world really understand what they are doing. To each other, to their own humanity, and to the earth, air and water that nurture life. The word that best seemed to describe what we are doing was “violence”, himsa, in its many forms. Violence for the domination and superiority of this or that group, supposedly held together by essential ties of religion, or culture, over some other group. Violence to grab in greed what is everyman’s need and could be shared in peace. Violence even for the control of what is unnecessary – what we could do without, at least until all in the human family are properly fed, clothed, sheltered and cared for.

The students noticed thousands of young and old, uninvited by governments, streaming into Paris for the European Social Forum, drawn by a similar hard-nosed utopia – “A better world is possible!”. Learning of the World Social Forum coming up in Bombay in January 2004, they proposed January 30th as the special day for introspection, hoping that weightier voices would take up the cause in Bombay. January 30th, because it is the day of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination by a man moved by puny ambitions. Ambitions of power and glory of a single "proud nation" for which Gandhi, who believed that all humanity was one family, had to die. The children were brimming with ideas. Stop all wars at least for a day. Use arms budgets to provide drinking water. Use no money (the best things in life are free). Don’t touch a car on that day (the need for oil leads to war). Reclaim the streets – get to know your neighbors. A No-Logo day, no branded clothes or shoes. And so forth. To each his or her gesture, no matter how small, in all conscience. Indeed, the best way to improve the world may be to improve oneself, rather than tell others how to live. None of us may have found the Truth, the correct Path. Perhaps the biggest Mahabharata, the hardest epic battle of all, is the battle against anger within ourselves.

It was Shirin Ebadi of Iran (Nobel 2003) who, grasping the significance of the children's call, spoke to young girls in the most modest of schools in Bombay, about non-violence (a-him-sa, "absence of the desire to hurt"). She spoke about the human family, of movements of national or religious pride leading to war and murder. She said that on January 30th, she would pray for peace in the world. The Indian girls promised to do the same. In Paris, on January 30th 2004, groups of children and teachers, unconcerned about official approval, observed their first Ahimsa day at school, and accross the river under the Eiffel tower.

Could we heed the message of the children in Paris and Bombay ? On January 30th, let each of us, wherever birth or fate has put us on our planet, stop in our routines and scrambles, and do some things differently. Let us remind governments, 'experts' and armies that they are only entitled to act in our name, for the common good. What sets us apart from the other creatures of the world is our power of imagination. Let us use it, in our classrooms, workplaces, homes and neighborhoods, so that on Ahimsa Day, improving ourselves, we could make the world a better place.

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