Indo/Pak issue: War or Peace?

Is the Pakistan/India situation really that complex? Or have we made it that way? Can we try to simply clear our vision, brush off some dust and see if we can reduce the complexity from a million units to a dozen?

War or peace?

I often hear this message going around "Enough of peace, now it's time for war!". But do we realize that  we can only give war a chance, not peace. Peace is not an entity that you can choose. It is simply the absence of violence.  Like health is simply a absence of disease.
When the disease is cured, health is what remains. When violence dies, peace remains. Violence is real. Peace is just a concept. Trying to achieve peace is like saying "I am trying to achieve Not-headache".

Violence is real. Peace is just a concept. Trying to achieve peace is like saying "I am trying to achieve Not-headache"

What goes around in the name of 'peace' is actually violence: 'repression' or a 'grudging tolerance' to be more accurate. Want to go for war, but we don't. The seed of violence is already sown. Do not agree or disagree - think about it. You are angry, you really want to hurt someone, but will not. Out of fear of a bigger backlash, because he is more powerful, out of a desire to maintain a peaceful IMAGE. Hence no argument, no war. Not yet. Is that a "peaceful" relationship? 

Peace should not be confused with 'normalcy' either. Normalcy is just what happens 'most of the time'. That does not make it right or ideal. Like border skirmishes have become a norm. They are not as bad as war, they do not impact our daily lives, they do not give us the 'vitality of coming together against a common enemy' or of 'Fighting for a cause'- but that does not mean we are in a state of peace.

The reason our efforts go waste is because they are focused on 'Achieving peace' - which is chasing a concept. Instead the focus should be to defeat violence, which we created in the first place. This gives us something REAL to start with - the conflict that exists right now. The significance of this difference is tremendously important. You do anything else - calling it justice, vengeance, fairness, dharma or any other label in the name of 'achieving peace', it is not peace. It is some anomaly which is a continuation of the same violence - which we might still not understand, explain or articulate or justify. But it is still not peace. That is certain.

The reason our efforts go waste is because they are focused on 'Achieving peace' - which is chasing a concept. Instead the focus should be to defeat violence

So questions like "Is it time for war?", "Is it time for dialogue?", "Should we tolerate this?" are all equally meaningless if we fail to ask the basic question: "Will this reduce or increase conflict?" Not to a horrific silence - which might have occurred at the end of say the atom bomb at Hiroshima. Or to a pretence of peace - which might occur as long as we have the war in our hearts instead of the battlefield. 

2 things to remember:

• Violence is real. Peace is simply the absence of violence. So the focus should not be on chasing a concept called peace, but to eliminate violence. This is a fact, not an opinion.
• All effort, including war - has to be a means to reducing conflict/violence. 

So if war entails more violence, can war never be an option?