peaking to the BBC Radio 4 about the travails of Partition and its enduring legacy, Dr Farhat Mahmood, a veteran Pakistani historian, made a strikingly candid observation. She said, “It is natural that every nation or community is afraid of war. Ironically, these two South Asian neighbours—India and Pakistan—are wary of peace.” His words carry a depth of wisdom and insight that forces a reconsideration of the conventional discourse around conflict in South Asia.

The metaphor he used—a bee is crawling in their bonnet—aptly captures the unease both nations seem to feel whenever the idea of peace begins to surface. Rather than inspiring relief or hope, the mere possibility of lasting peace appears to provoke anxiety. The reasons for this are deeply structural and psychological.

In times of peace, states are forced to confront many responsibilities including provision of education, healthcare, housing, justice and civil rights. Peace demands governance, not just displays of power. It calls for an honest reckoning with poverty, inequality, corruption and historical injustice. War, or the threat of war, provides a convenient distraction. When the national narrative is shaped by hostility and fear of an external enemy, it becomes easier for the ruling elites to suppress dissent and curtail freedoms. It enables governments to defer or deflect accountability for failures in governance.

As Bertrand Russell wrote in his essay, The Future of Mankind, “War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” He warned against the glorification of violence and the illusion that war could be a moral or lasting solution. Indian pacifist, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, cautioned that “patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity.” These voices, echoing across decades, resonate powerfully in the current context of India and Pakistan, who seem caught in a cycle of militaristic posturing and mutual suspicion.

Peace, ironically, can be more destabilising to certain regimes than war. For governments whose authority draws strength not from democratic consensus but from a siege mentality—where an external enemy is constantly evoked as justification for internal repression—peace is not a balm; it is a threat. It unsettles the very scaffolding of state propaganda. It invites reflection, introspection, and worst of all for autocratic or populist regimes, questions.

Peace democratises the national conversation. It cracks open the shell of fear and suspicion that has been carefully hardened over decades. Once the guns fall silent and the rattle of sabres stops the voices of the people rise; not in praise of leaders, but in protest and in inquiry. Ordinary citizens then start asking: Why are our schools crumbling? Why are our hospitals ill-equipped? Why do the poor continue to suffer while the elite grow richer? Why is dissent criminalised? Why must we always be preparing for war when we cannot feed our own? These are the kinds of questions that peace permits. These are the questions that war drowns in its drumbeat.

This paradox was not lost on George Orwell, who wrote in 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In Orwell’s dystopia, war is not a temporary emergency, but a deliberate tool of social control. War consumes resources, consolidates power and redirects public anger outward. The same mechanisms appear in play in parts of South Asia today. The bogey of the ‘enemy’—ever ready to strike—is invoked with such regularity that it becomes a national lullaby, soothing the masses into a kind of martial stupor.

War silences the questions that peace encourages. It cloaks inequality in the flag and wraps oppression in patriotic rhetoric. In such climates, even the call for dialogue is portrayed as weakness or betrayal. Beneath the bombast and bluster, the ordinary people of India and Pakistan—farmers in the Punjab, students in Lahore and Delhi, shopkeepers in Karachi and Mumbai—share a yearning both simple and profound: the desire to live without fear, to work, to learn, to travel and to dream.

Poll after poll, across decades, has shown that majorities on both sides of the border yearn for peace. They long for normal relations, open borders, cultural exchange, economic cooperation, and above all, stability. They want cricket, not conflict; trade, not tirades. And yet, a significant number of political leaders on both sides remains trapped in a narrative forged in the crucible of Partition—where suspicion is tradition and hostility is heritage. They are captives of their own rhetoric, unable or unwilling to dismantle the myth that war defines masculinity, nationhood and political legitimacy.

As Bertrand Russell astutely observed, “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth… Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions and comfortable habits.” These words ring especially true in societies where conformity is cultivated and where statecraft often thrives not on persuasion, but on suppression. Thought, in such contexts, is not merely inconvenient—it is dangerous. It questions sacred myths, disrupts inherited prejudices and interrogates the status quo with the sharp edge of reason.

Peace, by its very nature, creates room for such thought to flourish. It is not simply the silencing of guns, nor the absence of bloodshed—it is the beginning of a different kind of noise: the murmurs of inquiry, the dialogue of dissent, the chorus of citizens suggesting the kind of society they wish to inhabit. Peace removes the blindfolds, the ones stitched together by nationalism, fear and the politics of perpetual confrontation. It opens windows and lets the light in. For those whose power lies in shadows, who rule through fear rather than justice, this illumination is a mortal threat.

Peace is far more than a passive condition; it is a radical proposition. It invites possibility; the possibility is a deeply unsettling force for authoritarian minds. It means reimagining priorities, reallocating resources, and re-evaluating historical narratives. It means that citizens might begin to demand schools instead of missiles, dialogue instead of diatribe and rights instead of silence.

Russell, with his piercing wit, once remarked, “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Nowhere does this aphorism find a more tragic echo than in South Asia, where certainty has become a weapon and doubt a crime. In this nuclear-armed theatre of ancient wisdom and modern folly, the loudest voices are often the least thoughtful. They are brimming with unshakeable self-righteousness, unexamined patriotism and a belligerent certitude that drowns out the softer voices of reason, restraint and peace.

Public discourse, especially in times of political tension, is reduced to crude binaries: us versus them, nationalist versus traitor, loyalist versus enemy agent. Nuance is lost, complexity is banished and history is rewritten to serve the present fever. In this cacophony, pacifists and moderates are mocked and marginalised—treated either as naive dreamers or, worse, subversive elements.

George Bernard Shaw, with characteristic sharpness, once noted that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” While the phrase is often mistakenly attributed to Samuel Johnson, Shaw’s version seems particularly resonant in South Asia—a region that is both the cradle of ancient civilisations and the playground of modern populism. Here, patriotism is too often wielded not as a virtue of civic duty but as a bludgeon to silence dissent. It becomes the sanctuary of those who seek to obscure incompetence, deflect criticism and posture as guardians of national honour, all while failing to deliver justice, prosperity or peace. It is only when peace is reclaimed—not as a pause between wars, but as a political and moral imperative—that South Asia can begin to realise the full promise of its civilisation, built not on barbed wire and suspicion, but on dialogue, dignity and the courage to think.

Across history, war has been wrongly celebrated as a measure of power and masculinity. Peace, by contrast, has often been derided as weakness or compromise. True strength, however, lies not in destruction but in restraint. The legacy of Partition—a wound that still festers in the psyche of both nations—should be a reason to pursue reconciliation, not a justification for eternal conflict.

Peace and freedom are perhaps the two most cherished yet unrealised ambitions of human civilisation. Despite monumental advances in science and technology, these foundational goals remain elusive, because both require courage—not the courage to kill, but the courage to listen, to govern justly and to admit mistakes.

In South Asia, that courage remains in short supply.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.