Since the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, the vengeful tirades of television news anchors have drowned out the grief of the bereaved families and the sane voices of common people of Kashmir. An enigmatic Indian government promised action, leaving the operational details to the military. This set off a spiral of anger and anxiety between India and Pakistan.

Those of us who have spent our lives doing “peace work” watched, worried and horrified. It is a different South Asia today than when many of us started. In the face of loud and confident war-gaming by a stunning array of experts — with an equally stunning consensus on how India should respond — those of us who speak for peace are barely audible.

Today, hearing about the military escalation and loss of civilian lives on both sides, I feel compelled to list why restraint, diplomacy, dialogue and peace are the only way.

War is no game

Those who clamour for war are not those who are most affected by war. Sitting in seminar rooms, air-conditioned offices or television studios, war is an antiseptic and occasionally romantic adventure. But for those sent out into the battlefield, it can be death or disability. This cannot be a decision taken lightly. In a war, the families of those who fight suffer losses that they may be culturally socialised to accept but the absence of a parent, spouse or child is a lifelong wound for the bereaved.

People living along the border are caught in the cross-fire for reasons unrelated to their daily lives — their villages are in the path of terrorists or were shelled accidentally or deliberately.

Displacement, environmental damage and disability due to conflict injury are lasting legacies of conflict, as is the intergenerational trauma border communities carry. The human cost of war, even before you look at budgets and money, is too high.

To stress that war is the very last resort is not to dismiss the choices and sacrifices of soldiers. If anything, it is to honour them. Yes, they make this difficult professional choice that I would not. But they are not the ones to decide when to fight or who to fight — that decision rests (and should) with civilian leaders who should therefore err on the side of caution.

For you and I, as citizens, the best way to honour those who are willing to die in our defence is to hold governments accountable for the decisions that play with their lives. This includes the biggest decision — a declaration of war — and everyday decisions — the purchase of protective gear.

We should want to know and we should ask. The culture of secrecy that besets security matters stops us from doing our part, as of course, does our casual apathy. Militaristic governments take advantage of our indifference and cloaking soldiers with praise, make costly policy choices that cut short human lives.

Short of war too, what were the options exercised? The very first one was the decision to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty.

Our pliant press is now publishing articles about how it was an unfavourable treaty for India anyway. But if you start with the high moral ground, as you do after there is a terrorist attack on your soil, where does it leave you when you cut down the supply of water — essential and life-giving?

The cancellation of tourist, business and conference visas would have been fair game. Cutting down diplomatic representation, while keeping channels of communication open, are also standard.

But how do you revoke medical visas? Think about how difficult it is for the average household when someone falls ill. Barely making it month to month, if someone has an illness that cannot be cured by the local doctor, the family scrambles to gather savings, borrow money and liquify assets in order to make treatment possible. Add to this the cost of traveling to get a visa, then crossing a border, coming to a new place where you may not know the language. To revoke such visas is heartless.

Gender politics pervades security decisions. The war-mongering media chorus was mostly male; the decision-makers at the televised but closed-door meetings were mostly male; those who will go into battle and therefore, those killed or injured will be mostly male; and those whose words about security get read and quoted are mostly male. Women still play a minor role in all these areas but are largely the majority of those bereaved, displaced, assaulted sexually, left supporting families and without assets. Sexual and gender minorities are invisible and therefore receive, neither protection nor necessary support. 

The labelling of the May 6-7 air-strikes as “Operation Sindoor” underscores the patriarchal politics of war. It comes bearing an evocative graphic — because optics are everything in 2025 — of a spilt sindoor-daan (container of vermilion powder). Military action is then ostensibly an act of avenging the honour of bereaved widows. Women, for all of the presence of the women military officers at the first official briefing, are shown their place as symbols of a state-nation, defined by a single community (only some Hindu women wear sindoor), where heterosexual marriage is the primary social unit and women must be good wives, to be protected. But not heard – so feminist and pacifist politicians may please step aside.

Nuclear reality

In all this war-talk, the nuclear option is the elephant in the room. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear weapons states. Despite everything we know about the effect of the single atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what we have seen after the nuclear accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima, some still consider the use of these terrible weapons as not a big deal.

As studies have repeatedly demonstrated, in this region, to use nuclear weapons is suicide. It is also a disproportionate response because it is not an action against your contemporaries but future generations and given how interconnected our ecologies are, against the earth. To speak of this as something against which there is a defence and from which we can recover, is irresponsible.

Remember, our societies already reel from ordinary diseases and extraordinary pandemics without learning anything about public health defences or services. How will we cope with nuclear fallout? Further, given how easily passions are stirred, can we be sure that the hands on the nuclear button will not be tempted to make a grand gesture?

Terrorism is a scourge. It hurts its immediate victims, burns us slowly as we feed and fuel our vengeful anger. It decimates our humanity over time because we forget how to feel for each other.

We need to pause and breathe rather than allowing our emotions to spiral into the kind of violent anger we have been hearing. Stop to take care of the hurt and give them a little room to heal. Stop to think about the measures that will prevent and also respond to alienation. Stop to think about the costs of these measures, whether they will have unintended consequences and who will pay for them. The means must justify the ends, otherwise, we are no better than the ‘terrorists’. The standards of behaviour are higher for those who would claim the moral high ground.

Baying for blood, urging choices that place others’ lives in jeopardy and making inhumane decisions cannot be the way to peace. Perhaps there are prominent actors today who have made belligerent and genocidal choices with impunity but we can choose to model a politics of justice, care and yes, non-violence instead. Who we are in the world is ours to define.

(The writer is a peace educator and political scientist in Chennai. Views are personal. She can be reached at X @swarraj. By special arrangement with Sapan)