Why war is never the solution

We don’t realise that we are also casualties of geopolitics and that it is only a matter of time before we become statistics, too. People celebrate the success of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ in Prayagraj, on Wednesday. Pic/PTI

How do you compose yourself amid the warmongering? Especially because I am currently located remotely, the celebratory rallying of India's current military advances trigger in me a sense of disbelief. Imagine you had a fight with your neighbour and decided to poison their water supply. Do you really think the soil sitting on your plot of land won't ingest the toxicity? What makes you think your garden is immune? It sounds simplistic to reduce historical tensions between two post-colonial nations to gardening metaphors, but the reality is so much more stupid, tinged with hyperbolic reactions that only serve to further stimulate an ongoing cycle of violence. The need of the hour is not war but repair; not counter-attack but redressal mechanisms that can help assess the size of our existing wounds so that we do not need to cause further injuries.

Before the events of yesterday, I had been planning to write about attention. I wanted to explore its contours, what it means to incorporate it as a virtue within one's every day, especially given how our lives seem to unravel against the theatre of continuous distraction. War, too, is a manufactured distraction meant to deflect our attention from the realities that need our attention: climate change, pollution, growing inequalities and declining birth rates. Instead of focussing our energies on finding remedies, we are being called upon to beat battle drums and to cheer over the mindless slaughter of innocent people in the quest for gunning down terrorists. Israel's cruel occupation of Gaza and decimation of civilian lives and infrastructure in the name of revenge opened the gateway for all occupying forces to perpetuate further atrocities and to get away with impunity.

One of the most challenging aspects of the reality we are currently inhabiting is our growing inability to sift between what is fact and what is fiction. The lines have been intentionally blurred by those in power. Heavy censorship also means that the facts that do reach us, that we are exposed to, cannot be taken at face value. Yet, the fact that our education system doesn't privilege critical thinking makes puppets out of us all. We don't even realise we're being had. We don't realise that we are also casualties of geopolitics. We feel sure that sitting in the safety of our living rooms, we are protected from extremities, when in fact, it's only a matter of time before we become statistics too.

I've been writing a lot about how something fundamental about my feminist beliefs changed after I became a mother. Intersectional feminism had already altered my perception of reality in that I was able to gleam with clarity how our current post-apocalyptic reality has been shaped by the forces of patriarchy, capitalism, racism and casteism. As I began to incubate life inside my body, I began to think more astutely about reproductive justice, about what it means to centre the job of care-taking and what it entails to dedicate oneself to the nurturing of life. To embrace feminist motherhood is to embrace the cause of living, to reject the military industrial complex that makes human and other life dispensable by channeling its energies towards the efficient and swift extermination of the living in the name of revenge. When you begin to see the extractive nature of occupying forces, how they view land as a commodity to be owned, to be plundered, and see people as servile to the cause of hoarding resources, you can no longer turn a blind eye to the realities that plague us. You start to get more attentive towards how we are being made to be complicit in the destruction of the planet. You evolve greater clarity about who the enemy really is. I recently discovered there is a term for the kind of feminism I have been quietly espousing through these columns. Proposed by Andrea O'Reilly, it is called Matricentric feminism and engenders the positioning of mothers' needs and concerns as the starting point for a theory and politics on and for women's empowerment. ‘This repositioning is not to suggest that a matricentric feminism should replace traditional feminist thought; rather, it is to emphasise that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems mothers face - social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and so forth - are specific to women's roles and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers,' the abstract to O'Reilly's article in the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative expounds. Motherhood, the article suggests, could be understood as the unfinished business of feminism. I'm still educating myself about the theory, even though I know I embody it already through the activism I have been performing ever since I became a mother.

It is almost too easy to kill, to make war. It is so much more difficult to nurture and keep things alive. I am for an ideology and a politic that privileges the sustenance of life in all its abundance, glory and joy.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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