MOST constitutions anticipate a state of utopias. Established after great struggle they want to sustain the movement for liberation. However, they are constructed positively around a vague anticipation of peace rather than the distinct and specific possibility of war. Only two constitutions in the world claim some kind of anti-war position. The first is Japan which after the Potsdam declaration, renounced war. Announcing an adherence to pacifism, Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution stated that the Japanese people ‘renounce war as the sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.’ This act of renunciation of war covered both the domestic domain and international law. Commending the Japanese proposal, General MacArthur then recommended it as the only way to peace, contending that the unilateral renunciation of war had to be simultaneous and universal for the United Nations to achieve its goals. While Japan renounces the right to belligerence, it still retains a self-defence force limited to Japanese territory and its vicinity. It is clear that the pacifism advocated in the Japanese Constitution allowed it to take measures that were required for self-defence.

The treaty was in many ways a textbook exercise because Japan was ritually correct, it had played a role in Global Peace enforcement units to the UN. The war weariness of the Japanese nation has not extended to a creative theory of peace or peace building. The Japanese peace is more a form of political correctness, or an etiquette. It is not quite an ethics. The only other example one can think of is Costa Rica which abolished the military. A small conflict ridden nation state abolished its army after a bloody civil war. Costa Rica was one of the first countries to place trust in the international system. The dynamics of this abolition was complex but the abolition of military slowly created a culture where Costa Ricans believed that genuine security could only be built around the strength of democratic institutions. When the military as a vested interest is seen as an obstacle to freedom, thinking about peace becomes easier. The Costa Rican attempts to institutionalize biodiversity around indigenous knowledge, presents an additional step in the process. Sadly, no other country has made experiments that attempted peace in a constitutional way.

 

The question is, can one build peace within the categories of the nation state or does one rely more on a civilizational view of the world. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations becomes the joker in the pack by arguing that it is no longer ideology that is the source of Cold War conflict but the divisiveness created by civilizations. Probably the most serious attempt to challenge Huntington is Raimon Panikkar’s book Cultural Disarmament, where the author uses culture as an equivalent to Huntington’s deployment of the word civilization. Panikkar’s model is something India needs to build on.

Panikkar does not focus on the state and militarism. He concentrates on culture. This shift is critical because the creativity of India emerges more from cultural eccentricity and invention than from statist intervention. More particularly, culture becomes an epistemic counter of the nation state with RSS shakhas pretending to be paramilitary, disciplinary extensions of the regime. Panikkar also emphasizes that monoculture makes little sense to a peace experiment as the only peace they create is through a uniformity of culture and thinking. A peace in uniform is no real peace. Panikkar also goes beyond the dualisms which create an empire of dualisms as in the enlightenment model. His is a search for holistic models. He also breaks the dualism between logos, the domain of rationality and mythos, the world of tacit, taken for granted, a world beyond ideology. Panikkar cites three life giving myths, all non-dualist, which add to peace.

 

The first centres around the cosmic order, and Panikkar argues that a human peace has to be part of a cosmic peace. Time becomes critical here, and Panikkar challenges the idea of peace as a futuristic, utopian entity. Time, he says, cannot be separated between a conflictual present and a divinely ordained future called peace. The earth is no longer a preparation for heaven, but the site where man’s ultimate destiny is forged.

The third myth he offers is the myth of Gaia, a myth of non-individualistic and non-dualist relations to nature. Three myths as life giving worlds, challenge the militaristic and militant aspect of today’s ideologies of war.

By the time one reads Panikkar’s little manifesto ‘Nine Sutras on Peace’ and his belated Gifford lectures The Rhythm of Being, one realizes there is a deeper frame one can unfold. Two things are clear, peace is not an absence of war and non-violence is not a piece of passivity. Peace is the inner dignity of every being. It is a pilgrimage to constructing a different reality. Based on Panikkar and Gandhi we can visualize a peace constitution by amplifying his triad to a seven-fold frame where peace is a process:

1. A Cosmos, a sense of order.

2. Civilizations, invoking a dialogue across them.

3. A Constitution as a legal framework, a skeleton that needs culture to embody it.

4. A Syllabus, as a representation of the forms of knowledge in a society.

5. A Commons, which emphasizes the accessibility of space to a world of pluralistic ideas.

6. A Hab, a membership of a community which goes beyond the exclusiveness of nation state to dream of reciprocity and intercultural dialogue.

7. A sense of Hab which ties past, present, future into a sacrament of time which thinks beyond linearity or the violent fait accompli of the development process.

 

Peace in that sense is an unfolding of an imagination that goes beyond the mentalities of anti-war or anti-militarism, where the satyagrahi becomes a creative force. With cultural disarmament, as an astronomer at the Raman Research Institute (RRI) put it, ‘violence to food is as critical as the violence of militarism’, and may need more forms of ethical repair. The question now is, how does one think of a Peace Constitution in these terms. A Peace Constitution is part legal discourse, part manifesto, a bit of wishful thinking, elaborated as a thought experiment linking the ethical and political in a civilizational way.

To understand why peace cannot be just a piece of plumbing or a contract, maybe one should invoke Panikkar and Gandhi. In his ‘Nine Sutras on Peace’, Panikkar states: ‘Peace does not mean absence of force or of polarities… Peace does not entail the homogenization of everything. It means the participation in, and the contribution to, the rhythm of reality. It is a metaphysics of a world view, a way of life not a mere subject for tinkering.’

 

How does one look at the constitution in these terms? One is reminded of what E.L. Doctorow said about the U.S. Constitution: ‘It is five thousand words long but reads like fifty thousand.’ Also that ‘it lacks high rhetoric, shows not a trace of wit’. Yet it represents the will of a people and a peace constitution, which seeks to persuade a people to think and act differently. The Indian Constitution is not a set of diktats but an invitation to another mode of being. In all its prose, if there is one moment of poetry in the Constitution of India, it is in the Preamble, a quick statement of vision, rewriting history, promising liberty, equality and fraternity for all. The slogans of the French Revolution are a shorthand for the tenets of The Enlightenment but it is precisely these three words, which we regard as immutable that have undergone a deep transformation. One can look at it graphically as a dialogue, a struggle of three triangles.

If the first triangle evokes liberty, equality and fraternity, the second triangle summons the slogans of the Industrial Revolution, the ideas of rationality, growth and productivity, of an economic man challenging a political man, asking not just for a new political economy, but a new framework for peace. The encounter between the two gives us the possibility of sustainability, plurality and justice. The last triangle is a movement towards harmony in various forms. It evokes the possibilities of peace.

This story has to be told twice for the preamble to make sense. One has to go back to the silences of the Constituent Assembly, the absence of Gandhi, the haunting presence of the Partition and the Bengal famine. The Preamble evokes the enlightenment, the non-violent nature of the national movement, yet it does not refer to the genocidal moments, the creation myth of the nation state. One needs not just an evocation of universalism but a sense of the immediacy of the genocides that haunt us to this day, that helped create the administrative and political grammar of the nation state. Peace, if it is to delve into the cultural unconscious of our myriad civilizations, cannot begin with an act of silence which is an act of repression. Peace needs the recognition that the moment of Independence was a moment of genocide. The Indian nation state is sculpted out of two genocidal myths.

 

The hermeneutics of the Indian Constitution as a text has to be read differently. On one axis we have the Constitution as a legal enactment concerned with federalism, citizenship, rights, with the role of the state. On the other, we plot the grid we devised from Panikkar and Gandhi, not to disrupt the formal Constitution but to create a deep ecology of ideas, a civilization matrix that links knowledge and democracy through the Cosmos, Civilization, Constitution Syllabus, Commons and Community. We create what I have called in another context, the Tacit Constitution.

The idea of the Tacit Constitution borrows from the Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi’s idea of Tacit Knowledge. Polanyi observed wisely and astutely that science as an articulation of formal method is incomplete. It leaves behind silences, the taken for granted, a world recognized but unsaid. To comprehend science more fully, we have to understand the tacit knowledges of science as a phenomenon. Similarly, a constitution as a legal architectonic, is embedded in the deep structures of a world view which determines its dynamics. A Tacit Constitution gives us a non-violent entry into creating avenues for peace as a possibility.

A cosmology deals with the relation between man, nature and God. Nature was once, as Panikkar put it, ‘a part of the community, the house, the habitat of man.’ The sacredness of nature was taken for granted. In fact, man had no sense of nature, he was a part of it. But today nature and culture are segregated and opposed to each other. This act of distancing has made nature an alien, or domesticated it into a resource. One has lost the sense of nature as an organism, as Gaia or even the ideas of macrocosm and microcosm, with man representing the latter. One has to return to this principle and make nature not only a part of the social contract, but part of the sacramental understanding of life. Scientists like C.V. Seshadri and Isabelle Stengers speak of the re-enchantment of nature. By invoking nature, we rescue economics from being a dismal science of scarcity, allow for other motivations beyond profit. Mathew Ricard’s ideas of altruism transforms the violence of nature.

The regime’s attempt to treat ‘Ganga’ as sacred was a half-hearted attempt at such a recognition. Peace becomes more possible when nature becomes not a dead material but a living entity. The idea of Gaia, despite its controversial beginnings, could be a brave addition to the Constitution. Sadly, the way the government conceives of the Ganga, despite its sacredness, is as if it is an extension of a PWD department. G.D. Agarwal’s recent fast to save the Ganga should have been welcomed for its constitutional possibilities. Sadly, Agarwal’s protest was ignored and the Ganga is reduced to a banality of dams and pollution.

 

A constitution needs myths of multiple time. Unfortunately, the Indian Constitution has borrowed its myths of time from the Gregorian Calendar and from the linear ideas of progress and development. Development creates a dualism between backward and advanced, allowing and legitimating advanced societies to erase or eliminate tribal, nomadic and agricultural groups. A constitution built on linear time or a gradient of development gives no agency to the margins. Multiple times and a constitutional which gives civilizational recognition of multiple times is the only way to prevent genocide. Such multiple time allows one to look at the rights of the displaced, the obsolescent, and declare social triage, the systematic determination of adefeated people, as against the constitution and the laws of humanity. The national movement under Ananda Coomarswamy fought against the museum, arguing it smelt of death and formaldehyde, the dyingness of cultures that the West had forced into oblivion.

 

A civilizational idea of ethics also brings into being a different tropis of caring. A constitution in that sense needs a different narrative where beyond accounting as cost benefit analysis, accountability, responsibility and trusteeship, and sacrifice are woven in as a civilization idea. The life world of sustainability cannot be built on corporate ideas of CSR or merely on managerial ideas of sustainability or even on the basic language of rights. Sustainability is not renewal, it is an attempt to extend the life of an object as storytelling, of the articulation of newer possibilities. That is why a mere number is not enough. One needs a sense of the other in responsibility, a caring for the other beyond economics, as in the Gandhian idea of trusteeship, and even the sense of sacrifice. A secular constitution bereft of such civilizational ideas becomes impoverished.

The triangle of liberty, equality and fraternity is not an equilateral triangle. Western political theory has worked more in elaborating the ideas of liberty and equality. Fraternity has often been a silent term, more summoned by revolutionary movements as a prelude to the genocide. Fraternity has to anchor itself on diversity, difference, plurality, because all too often the fraternity of the nation state is anchored on uniformity, an alliance of like entities, an obsession with similarity. The right to diversity and the availability of alternatives has to become a part of fraternity. Once diversity becomes axiomatic to a constitution, the right to thought experiments and alternatives becomes part of the citizens right to alternative imaginations. Panarchy becomes a part of plurality where solutions will now vary in scale rather than be subject to rule of hierarchy, uniformity and centralization. Diversity then also becomes a sacrament and a ritual of trusteeship.

India has to constitutionally preserve its 150,000 vanities of rice and diversity of soils. Diversity involves not just a trusteeship of nature but a trusteeship of cultures. A right to diversity has to guard against language loss. Diversity needs to be articulated constitutionally in planetary terms, where genocide (the elimination of a people), ecocide (the elimination of nature which renders livelihood sustainability impossible or less inept), lingucide (the destruction of the language of a people) are read as crimes against humanity.

 

Diversity is anchored on the availability of the plurality, not just of religions but of knowledge systems. The hegemony of science cannot be perpetuated by the inscription and diffusion of the scientific temper because science and the epistemic violence of science, especially in the age of nuclear energy and the concentration camps has to be recognized constitutionally. One cannot have a separate constitution for the crimes committed in the name of enlightenment. The works of Robert Lifton, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman cannot be placed outside the range of ordinary literacy. To guarantee diversity in a cognitive sense, to go beyond a cosmetic idea of tolerance or a celebration of exoticism, one needs to introduce the idea of cognitive justice.

The term cognitive justice emerged within the developmental debates in India around the battle for livelihoods. Cognitive justice defines the right of all forms of knowledge, marginal or mainstream, to survive and invent, as long as they are anchored in the livelihood and the myths of the people. In this context one has to recognize that the distinction between science and ethnoscience does not quite do away with the apartheid of knowledge systems. Cognitive justice needs a dialogue of knowledge systems. The dialogue of medical systems is an easily adoptable model where religion, epistemology and health were discussed comparatively. Plurality might increase disorder but brings down the violence of systems.

A university in a constitutional sense must anchor the plurality of knowledge systems. For example, one could think of each university constitutionality as a trustee of four knowledge or livelihood systems. Firstly, it is trustee of a craft, a local dialect or language, a species, especially an endangered one. Finally, each university because of the space it occupies becomes part of an ecological corridor adding to the environmental legacy of the area. It is not only forests which perform as biodiversity reserves. That same function combining culture and nature, language and technology, could be sustained by universities. Trusteeship becomes a major ritual in sustaining a sacrament called peace. Defeated knowledges and what are called sunrise industry, get a place in such a system.

 

Another aspect of this trusteeship is the institutionalization of what has been dubbed as Truth Commissions. The early history of truth commissions was disastrous. They were more attempts to create amnesty rather than an encounter with truth and its transformative possibility. The challenge before India is, can we apply the idea of the truth commission to Kashmir, Manipur or in a different way to the project called development? Truth commissions in that sense go beyond the idea of the right to information. Here, one is capturing a discourse and its ideas of justice and injustice and creating the stage for the ethical repair of a system. Truth commissions become public ways of redeeming the repressed unconscious of a system. A truth commission on the Partition rather than being a bureaucratic blame game can clean the air for a conversation between India and Pakistan. New thought experiments should be part of the new constitutional repertoire, creating the possibility of a playful ethics of peace. The Directive Principles become central in this context.

 

One is not attempting to create a theoretical repertoire of peace; instead, one is asking people to see peace as a kind of ethical entrepreneurship, a theatre which promotes public understanding. E.L. Doctorow gives an example of how the presence of such exemplars can provide one with both dissenting imaginations and new paradigms for understanding power. Doctorow cities the example of Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was fearless and very funny, with the humour, the precision of insight, of a great political cartoonist. And as an activist he puts his body on the line. In the sixties he was a scruffy sort of fellow, skinny and nimble, somewhat unwashed looking with his torn tee shirt and jeans, his long hair and his headband. He was the founder of Yippes, the Youth International Party. And, he was in the vanguard of the anti-war movement in the days of big street demonstrations, much like the one the students, these days, have been having in China, and for the same reason, to bring the government into alignment with the popular will of the people.

Abbie did street theatre, he staged events that might be clownish or vulgar but that invariably caught attention of the media and enraged the authorities. He got people terribly mad, Abbie, and for very good reason: he was insufferable. He was insufferable, because he held the mirror up so that we saw ourselves. That’s just what biblical prophets did, they operated in just that way. Wasn’t it Isaiah who walked about naked to prophesy the deportation of Jews? And wasn’t it Jeremiah who wore a yoke around his neck to prophesy their slavery? A similar insufferable thing, Abbie was a kind of unacknowledged legislator of this order. One needs the theatre of such experiments for the public to respond to the idea of peace as a possibility. Imagine the Khudai Khitmatgar moving from locality to locality, discussing how peace panchayats could handle communal violence or act against mob lynching.

 

Citizenship is defined in constitutions in formal terms of entry and access, defining criteria for membership. It is seen more as a final state than a gradient of statuses. The uniformity attributed to it blinds one to issues like war, epidemics, disasters or even to liminality. Citizenship to migrants in an informal economy where ‘regularization’ and other entitlements takes decades unless they are accelerated by corruption or electoral logic. In fact, citizenship in a nation reflects an oasis of calm surrounded by oustees, displaced people, refugees, homeless, stateless, disaster victims. The liminality of citizenship where there is a bureaucratic arbitrariness about selection needs a greater understanding and elaboration in unstable situations like Assam or in the case of Rohingya, now interned in camps in Bangladesh.

The question one has to ask is whether the idea of rights, a rigid form of certification, which has no place for hospitality and compassion, or can rights in war economies and unstable political situations have a more amphibian definition, when borders are porus, when livelihood demands migration, where margins and persecuted minorities merge? Should citizenship in a democratic age have a more porous quality? When citizenship depends on a clerical definition of legitimacy, can we put people in detention centres, which are literally gulags. The detention or the anticipated detention of four million ‘non-citizens’ in Assam, the very normalization of it, creates gulags of the mind which governance banalizes. When the privilege of citizenship is created through the surveillance techniques of the panopticon and the enclosure movement, violence becomes a part of everydayness. Democracy then has to ask whether some forms of citizenship are more equal than others. Worse, has Stalinism become a way of life as China detains a million tribals and India tries to outdo it demographically?

 

A constitution as a formal document, may not have the grammar to answer it. But the nature of war and violence is such that it challenges the languages of governance. Do hospitality, compassion, conscience work outside the realm of formal responsibility? A Peace Constitution has to provide a response to its re-reading the idea of the frontier and its diffuse forms of membership in terms of the crisis of citizenship. One has to emphasize that mere humanitarianism is inadequate, firstly because it is asymmetrical, in which it defines a dispensed community because it is temporary. Rushing aid and relief is critical but it does not solve the crisis. Maybe this is one place where SAARC as an imagination, can create the crystal seed of a new imagination. The very idea of border and frontier creates a necessity of a conversation between nation states.

To the bicameral parliament of today, we need to add a third house to recognize the sheer connectivity between nations and an anticipatory sense of crisis. We need a third house to make SAARC equivalent to the European Union, not merely to express a common hospitality to the migrant but to find the crevices of hope and conscience in the immobility or even indifference of the nation state to such problems. A common group sharing a problem might be more inventive of solutions. For example, SAARC could initiate a dialogue not just across nations, but a dialogue across religions and civilizations, a dialogue which has conscience and compassion as civilizational norms. If Aung San is feeling that it is the Buddhist priesthood along with the army that is triggering the violence against Muslims in the Rakhine region, then it is time that Buddhists elsewhere enter into a conversation.

Citing a Teresa or a Dalai Lama or even a Pope Francis does not exhaust the possibility of ethics. Maybe India’s university of Nalanda, India’s spiritual legacy, has to offer to the problems of homeless, stateless people. Citing a Teresa or a Nalanda could begin a dialogue on this instead of extending a jihadi mentality to all such problems. Compassion needs a constitutional anchor and a creative experiment. The Rohingya crisis and the National Register in Assam demand that we go beyond the provinciality of ethnic electoral demands.

 

Citizenship as a concept also repeatedly confronts the split between lay and expert in domains of security where expertise is valued. The general frame of mind which attributes objective knowledge to one side and the confusion and illiteracy of lay knowledge and its subjectivity to the other, is a bit out of date and undemocratic. One has to create a dialogue and the possibilities of translation between expert and lay dialects to create a rational discourse. The battles around the Kudankulan nuclear plant, the struggles over the damage done by the Sterlite plant at Thootakodi, reveal the need for a conversation of knowledges.