Gandhian dialogue on radicalization, education and training in his vision and methods of nonviolence; visiting human suffering with love and compassion in the conflict zone of Jammu & Kashmir and in radicalized tribal belt of eastern India has built community peace-infrastructures in 16 districts; motivated youth away from ideologies of hate and violence; 100+ dedicated Gandhi Peace-Makers resolved this year 21 violent conflicts. Radicalization tended at its root can stop breeding extremism.
Jammu & Kashmir and tribal belt of Bihar pose a common challenge: how to win-over youth from the spiral of disaffection-militancy-extremism-hate and violence. Extolling virtues of nonviolence does not help, conducting experiments in Gandhi's transformative dialogue on extremism and nonviolence helps. Had we invested in what Gandhi called 'science of soul', it would speak too as a 'won-over' leader Bhola, said "Teachers, doctors don't visit feared villages, police do."Now we are respected."
Grassroots public /group/ individual dialogues, 2 to 4-day education and training sessions have created mandate, built community based Gandhi Peace-Makers who conduct nonviolence campaign involving schools-colleges-youth organization; constitute local, regional peace-monitoring/maintaining infrastructure, intervene in and resolve community based conflicts. Youth leader Rameez writes in a radical Kashmir News "Gandhi's nonviolence is relevant to our context where bloodshed seems the only answer."
Escalation of mutual suspicion and mistrust between Hindu and Muslim in Kashmir, distancing among neighbors, weakens social fabric to allow harboring of the deviant. Building bridges discourages radicalization; heightens regional peace imperatives. Community's self-reliance in peace building shapes sustainable peace. Only socially mobilized and organized nonviolence, our experiment has shown, can arrest the growth of extremism by winning over potential recruits, opening ways for home-coming.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
