As this was the first meeting of PBFI, it was necessary to determine the goal of PBFI.

The goals were:

• Sharing Peacebuilding & Nonviolence Resources: to be able to exchange ideas, methods and strategies in reducing conflict and/or violent situations.

• Coordinating effective nonviolent responses to conflicts and potential conflicts that inflict violence: Not only will we learn from each other’s experience, but we can coordinate more effectively on different conflicts. For example, many demands are coming from Manipur to address the present conflict and although some organizations are providing much needed relief, they are not able to graduate to peacebuilding because there is a shortage of people with the profile, requisite capacities, and available time to spare.

• Through Peacebuilders Forum India, a group of people can coordinate a variety of inputs so a rapid and effective response can be realized.

Agenda Summary

DAY 1

1. Overview of Peacebuilders Forum India – Framing the Workshop by PV Rajagopal & Jill Carr-Harris
2. Peacebuilder Presentations

ISSUES

• Glaring disparity – Chandigarh has 1/3rd slum population; ‘cities as parasites’ consume electricity, food, water, land etc whereas the earth’s resources are not enough to meet the wants.
• Gender discrimination – Half a million girls killed (female infanticide)
• Communal riots / violence – 42 sensitive areas in Hyderabad; Development strategies are divisive; Segregating among communities; weaponization of religion.
• Violence at home between husband & wife; Children exposed to violence at home; Drug & liquor mafia use children to commit crimes; Caste and gender-based violence is increasing
• Naxalites (Maoists) – leadership is upper caste, highly educated, privileged. The foot soldiers are harijan, Adivasi communities. Turf war between the Gov’t forces and the Maoists. Maoists have different idea/vision of India.
• Structural violence – caste, class and gender
• Market & State failed in their promises to citizens. They cannot solve people’s problems. NN Vohra Committee 1993 – criminal-politician nexus (criminalization of politics) – mafia runs parallel govt in India. More than 50% of elected representatives with criminal records have captured the Government.
• 7 to 8% economic growth has not liberated 84 crore people from PDS. Then what is the benefit of growth?
• Local self Govt, PESA, FRA, RTI, RTE – ACTS coupled with Govt schemes is not reaching common people.
• SIRDS & NGOs have not yet sufficiently trained the elected local self govt reps enough to sufficiently govern
• Independent civil society organizations have conflict in sharing power – the State aids it and does not want to resolve it
• Conflicts in Individuals, families and communities. Inter-caste, inter-religious marriage conflicts. Post marriage conflict – between couples and between parents & children.
• Inter-caste conflicts – although they are economically and politically almost as impoverished as each other.
• Lack of Inter-religious harmony is a problem. Religion and religion-based conflicts are not resolved
• Inter-party rivalry and Political conflict – Thousands of individuals are in jails. Thousands affected.
• Religious conflicts
• Poorest of the poor – Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes – Adivasis
• Raw material for artisans are not in the control of artisan themselves.
• Family relationships conflicts. Parenting conflicts. Abandonment of elders – discrimination – gender and disability. financial crisis – materialism vs spiritualism. interference of social media and technology in family relationships.
• 1400 Manipuri families – lost everything religious freedom & security is threatened. Indian Identity threatened – perception as non-Indian outlook of Indians. Lost property and livelihood – lost everything. The State has aided violence – people have lost trust on the State. Students are dropped out of schools & colleges. Unemployment leading to lack of selfrespect and low self-esteem

DAY 2

1. Strategies for Peace – Group (4 groups) Discussion and Presentation.
2. Peacebuilding Leadership Development
3. Development of Youth Leadership for Nonviolence, peace and conflict resolution
4. Communal Harmony
5. Climate Change
6. Building Local Self-Governance – G. Palanthurai
7. Collaborating with the Government on Peacebuilding: The State can be Non-Violent and more Conversational – Anuradha Shankar
8. Panel Presentation & Discussion – exploring strategies for local, national and international peacebuilding

Panel 1- Community (Local) Peacebuilding

Panel 2 – National Peacebuilding

Panel 3 – International Peacebuilding

1. Peacebuilding, Youth and Theatre: Theatre presentation by Youth
2. Informal Group Discussion on ‘power of 10’ strategy: Indira Dasgupta and Pramod Sharma

DAY 3: Final Recommendations

Below there are the 26 Final recommendations of the Meet.

Grassroots Leadership:

1. Working on a process of grassroots mobilization (Jai Jagat circle of ten) resulting from the two peacebuilders sessions. This could benefit from the 10 years of work on Jai Jagat and help to rekindle it.
2. Develop a green and white paper to guide this process. And circulate among the participants so that they can decide how to integrate their existing youth volunteers.

Leadership of Youth for Nonviolence and Peace

3. Creating a group to look into complimentary education strategies.
4. Increasing awareness among teachers and parents for alternative educational experiences.
5. Promote compassionate education in other states based on the Telangana experience.
6. Bringing alternative education into distress areas like Manipur.
7. Share resources (Rabbi, Mazher, Fr. Scaria, CESCI, Mathew, Pramod) – one day seminar presentation of the content, material, methods, tools as to how these courses is delivered). Later share the resources in the google drive. Then decide who is going to use these materials and how. Pramod has already put some in the PBIF group.

Communal Harmony

8. Encourage and support inter-faith, multi-faith and intra-faith processes that are happening in the country.
9. Include communication the constitution and constitutional values. Here also we can utilise the efforts made by few Dalit groups. We can clarify by identifying the resources/groups and later. Mazher is trying to look at moving the understanding from ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens. Dalit groups are leaning towards justice. And few other groups are leaning towards peace.
10. There are intra-faith WhatsApp group – on zoom we can look at the resources – celebrating common festivals, religious leaders.
11. Communal harmony is sensitive and context specific. A lot more approaches need to be explored and piloted. Mazher Hussain’s model is what we have at the present. We need to explore more. We can call a zoom meeting and ask participants to bring more resources / models on CH.

Climate Change 

12. Linking peace with environment such as expansion of military industry and wars.
13. Work to change lifestyle and to promote a nonviolent economy.
14. Need a lot more data / analysis for understanding military budget and comparison to education, livelihood, and health care etc. more debates and discussion needs to happen.
15. Have peacebuilders develop more understanding of alternative nonviolent economy as part of peace. And how it could be practiced and popularised.

Local Peace-making

16. Resolve conflict at local level to prevent conflict at higher level (caste, resource, hierarchy-based, livelihood..)
17. To do this we need mediators to reconcile conflict and they need to be from diverse groups.
18. Find strategies for helping people to gain economic livelihood (re: nonviolent economy)
19. Strengthen local governance with people’s participation.