IN contemporary India — and indeed across much of the world — the discourse on human rights and peacebuilding often remains confined to formal institutions, policy rhetoric, and elite dialogues. While such spaces carry value, they frequently overlook a fundamental truth: human dignity is shaped at the grassroots, in the lived experiences of communities, and in the intimate everyday negotiations of people who stand at the margins of power. It is here, in the complex and often contradictory social terrain of cities like Varanasi, that the principles of peace, justice, and pluralism are continuously tested.
This understanding came into sharp focus during the recent visit of post-graduate students from the Peace Studies Department, MIT World Peace University (MIT-WPU), Pune. The four students — Neha Barua, Jalshmita Kalita, Dnyaneshwari Virole, and Kiran Leema — accompanied by Assistant Professors Dr. Mohit Awasthi and Dr. Jyotsna Srivastava, undertook field immersion with the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR). Their visit was arranged through the initiative of Professor Priyankar Upadhyaya, the UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Understanding at Banaras Hindu University.
Though modest in scale, the visit carries significant academic and social meaning. It highlights a transition underway in India: the integration of empirical field engagement into peace and conflict studies, and a growing acknowledgment that knowledge production must be anchored in the realities of marginalized communities. This aligns with global trends in peace research that emphasize local agency, bottom-up interventions, and context-sensitive strategies — principles long advocated by UNESCO, the UNDP, and the global South’s scholars of human security.
Varanasi as a Living Laboratory of Peace and Conflict
Varanasi — often celebrated as an ancient spiritual capital — is far more than a religious destination. It is a densely layered civilizational space where cultural diversity, social hierarchies, contestations of identity, and institutional inequities coexist. For peace scholars, it provides a rare opportunity to study how plural societies sustain themselves over centuries, how conflict emerges, and how cultural resilience is maintained.
Historically, Varanasi has been a crossroads of philosophical traditions. Hindu Shastric learning thrived here, but so did the early teachings of the Buddha in nearby Sarnath. Jain Tirthankars left their imprint on its sacred geography. Guru Nanak’s visit connected it with Sikh thought. Sufi influences intertwined with Bhakti movements, producing egalitarian voices like Sant Kabir and Raidas, who offered profound critiques of caste and orthodoxy. Muslim artisans shaped the identity of the Banarasi sari, embedding Islamic aesthetics in a garment revered in Hindu ritual and Indian cultural consciousness.
Varanasi’s pluralism, therefore, is not an abstraction. It is historical, embodied, and continuously recreated. It is also contested.
Contemporary political currents have attempted to appropriate or narrow this heritage. Anxieties regarding cultural homogenization, economic globalization, and sectarian mobilization have altered the city’s social equilibrium. These shifts provide important insights into the broader challenges facing India’s constitutional vision of equality, secularism, and fraternity.
It is in this complex environment that the MIT-WPU students engaged with PVCHR’s work.
Understanding Grassroots Realities Through Field Immersion
Peace studies as a discipline increasingly recognizes the limitations of purely theoretical frameworks. The problems of violence, discrimination, and structural injustice require engagement with lived realities. Field immersion enables students to develop what Johan Galtung termed “positive peace consciousness,” moving beyond the absence of violence to the presence of justice.
The students’ conversations at PVCHR covered four interlocking domains central to contemporary human-rights discourse in India: caste-based discrimination, gender violence, interfaith coexistence, and the functioning of local justice systems.
1. Caste and the Neo-Dalit Framework
PVCHR’s advocacy for the “neo-Dalit movement” was a key theme of the dialogues. The concept challenges caste hierarchy not only through legal reform but by building solidarities between all oppressed communities — Shudras, Ati-Shudras, and other structurally marginalized groups. This is, in essence, a socio-political innovation that aligns with global movements for dignity and equality, echoing the frameworks of Paulo Freire’s conscientizaĆ§Ć£o, African liberation philosophies, and Latin American social justice traditions.
For the students, the neo-Dalit movement highlighted that caste is not merely a social identity — it is a system of power that restricts economic opportunity, bodily autonomy, mobility, and political voice.
2. Gender, Human Security, and Everyday Violence
Discussions on violence against women embedded the understanding that gendered oppression is not an isolated phenomenon but is reinforced by caste, class, and cultural expectations. The students examined case studies of survivor-centered justice, learning how PVCHR combines testimonial therapy with legal empowerment. This aligns with contemporary peace psychology, which emphasizes healing and resilience as prerequisites for sustainable peace.
3. Interfaith Dialogue as Social Infrastructure
Varanasi’s pluralism offered a natural setting to explore interfaith coexistence. The students saw how artisans, priests, weavers, musicians, shopkeepers, and ordinary citizens preserve harmony through everyday interactions. Interfaith coexistence is not maintained through government proclamations but through the continuous work of communities who share space, economy, ritual, and culture.
The students recognized that peace is not simply the absence of conflict but the presence of shared cultural practices, mutual respect, and trust.
4. Institutional Weakness and the Culture of Impunity
PVCHR’s documentation of torture, discrimination, and administrative failure revealed a systemic challenge: the persistence of impunity. The students discussed how structural violence is sustained by the failures of local institutions. This is a core insight of transitional justice studies: without accountability, cycles of injustice internalize themselves.
Regional Peacebuilding and the South Asian People’s Forum
The visit also included discussions on cross-border peace efforts. The South Asian People’s Forum (SAPF), emerging from the People’s SAARC convention in 2005, demonstrates how civil-society networks across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan have worked collectively to promote human rights and nuclear disarmament.
Gifting Knowledge: Books as Tools of Peace
Toward the end of the visit, an exchange of books provided a symbolic and intellectual bridge. PVCHR gifted three publications:
- Reformative Approaches to Human Rights — advocating for restorative, survivor-centered justice systems.
- Margins to Centre Stage: Empowering Dalits in India — documenting transformative strategies for marginalized communities.
- Dalits in Independent India — analyzing persistent structural inequities since Independence.
Books carry significance in peace work. They are repositories of memory, critique, and imagination. Their gifting signals intellectual partnership, mutual accountability, and shared commitment to human rights.
The students were also informed about the forthcoming book Kashi, co-authored by myself, Chandra Mishra, and Shruti Nagvanshi, to be published by HP Hamilton, UK. The book seeks to recover the suppressed histories of Kashi — stories long erased through caste hierarchies, patriarchy, political spectacle, and the commodification of culture — by reclaiming the city’s plural, humane, and deeply inclusive ethos. It challenges narratives that reduce Kashi to a religious symbol or tourist commodity, instead reasserting Mahadev’s philosophy of simplicity over greed and compassion over consumption, while amplifying the invisible voices of oppressed communities who have shaped the city for centuries. Kashi is not a nostalgic project; it is a counter-hegemonic narrative that contests the appropriation of heritage and affirms that safeguarding the city’s plural civilizational values is essential to protecting India’s constitutional character.
Academic Significance of the Visit
From an academic standpoint, the field study advanced three major pedagogical outcomes:
1. Integrating Theory with Praxis
Students observed how concepts in peace studies — structural violence, restorative justice, positive peace, intersectionality, pluralism — apply in actual communities. This form of learning aligns with UNESCO’s emphasis on “learning to live together.”
2. Developing Critical Reflexivity
Engaging with survivors, activists, and community leaders requires students to reflect on their own positionality. This reflexivity is essential in peace research to avoid paternalism and to cultivate ethical engagement.
3. Enhancing Contextual Understanding
Peacebuilding models are effective only when adapted to context. By witnessing the unique socio-cultural landscape of Varanasi, students learned how context shapes conflict — and how solutions must be rooted in local realities rather than transplanted frameworks.
Why This Visit Matters for India’s Future
India’s peacebuilding environment faces multiple challenges: rising polarization, weakening trust in institutions, inequalities intensified by rapid economic changes, and the politicization of cultural heritage. Amid these pressures, the next generation of peace scholars and practitioners must be equipped with grounded understanding, empathy, and analytical rigor.
The visit by the MIT-WPU students is significant because it represents a deeper educational shift: the recognition that peace cannot be built without understanding the marginalized, and that conflict cannot be resolved without confronting the structures that create injustice.
Their engagement also challenges the growing disconnect between academia and society. It suggests that universities in India are increasingly willing to integrate experiential learning, field immersion, and community partnerships into their curriculum.
Pluralism at a Crossroads
Varanasi may symbolize India’s civilizational depth, but it also represents the fragility of pluralism in contemporary politics. When the spirit of pluralism is diminished, heritage loses its resilience, and when heritage is reframed for exclusion, the integrity of justice is quietly undermined.
Field visits like this one remind us that safeguarding pluralism is not merely a cultural project — it is a democratic imperative. It requires academic institutions, civil society, and young scholars to actively defend the values of dignity, equality, and coexistence.
Knowledge, Empathy, and the Ethics of Peace
The MIT-WPU visit to PVCHR exemplifies the kind of engagement necessary to build a peaceful and just India. It demonstrates that peace studies must be rooted in experiential learning. It reaffirms the importance of grounding academic inquiry in the perspectives of marginalized communities. And it underscores that pluralism and human rights must be strengthened not only through institutions, but through cultural consciousness.
As India and the world navigate an era of uncertainty, the principles embodied in this visit — curiosity, empathy, reflexivity, and intellectual honesty — serve as a compass. Peacebuilding begins in such moments of connection. It begins when young minds encounter the realities of injustice and commit themselves to shaping a more humane future.
No comments:
Post a Comment