I was born in 1975, and as I turn 50 this year, I find myself reflecting on a life lived in relative peace. Despite growing up in a country as diverse and politically complex as India, I have never personally witnessed war. I’ve never seen bloodshed in the streets, never stumbled upon the body of a child lying lifeless on a road, never mourned a loved one lost to violent conflict. My understanding of war, like that of many Indians, comes not from lived experience but from newspapers, textbooks, and films.
The first act of violence that registered in my consciousness occurred in 1984, with the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. That event, sparked by Operation Blue Star in Punjab, led to the horrific anti-Sikh riots in which thousands of Sikhs were brutally killed—burned alive, stoned to death, lynched by mobs. Fortunately, I didn’t witness any of it firsthand. I only read about it, like so many others, in the pages of daily newspapers. The violence of 1984 also set in motion a period of terrorism in Punjab that took nearly a decade to control.
Things seemed to stabilize in the aftermath, until L.K. Advani, a politician born in Karachi, led the infamous Rath Yatra in 1990. This religious-political rally eventually culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, triggering nationwide riots and the loss of countless lives. Again, I saw none of this in person, but I followed the tragic unfolding of events through media reports. Around the same time, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE in 1991, though his death, surprisingly, did not lead to widespread violence.
Between 1992 and 2002, India experienced a relative lull in large-scale communal conflict. One exception was the 1999 Kargil War, during the tenure of BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It was a significant military conflict, but unlike global wars, it didn’t result in widespread civilian casualties. The peace, however, was again broken in 2002 by the Godhra train burning incident, which led to horrific communal riots in Gujarat. The state’s Chief Minister at the time was Narendra Modi.
From 2002 until 2014, India remained largely free from major internal strife, despite the ever-present tension with neighboring Pakistan. The surgical strike on Pakistan in 2019 was a military move of significance, but it didn’t spill over into the lives of civilians, nor did it carry the kind of trauma that war typically leaves behind.
Between 2014 and 2018, I had the opportunity to travel extensively—visiting nearly 30 European countries. It was during these travels that I truly came to understand the psychological weight of war. Europeans, I realized, still live in the long shadow of World War II. The trauma is generational, embedded in their collective memory. Whenever the subject of the war came up in conversation, there was an almost sacred silence. People avoided discussing Adolf Hitler, refused to mention Mein Kampf, and stayed clear of any associations with the swastika. Many discouraged me from visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau, not because it wasn’t worth seeing, but because it was still too raw, too painful for them.
Everyone I met had lost someone—an uncle, a father, a grandfather—to the war. The pain was real, unprocessed, and yet deeply respected. Peace, to Europeans, is not just an abstract ideal; it is something earned through unimaginable suffering.
In contrast, Indians have very little generational memory of war. We have never had to deal with mass civilian casualties. Our wars—be it the invasions of the past or the battles of independence—were primarily between armies and kings. Civilians were rarely caught in the crossfire. The one tragic exception in modern history is the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, an incident that remains a chapter in history books or a scene in films, not a scar on our collective psyche.
World War I and II, despite being global in impact, barely touched the Indian civilian population. While Indian soldiers did fight in those wars under British command, their stories were never fully integrated into our national consciousness. For most Indians, war remains a concept seen on the big screen or debated in political rhetoric, not something known in the gut.
And that is why, I believe, we as a nation struggle to fully appreciate the value of peace. Without the trauma of war, it is difficult to understand what peace truly costs. We take stability for granted. We forget that in many parts of the world, peace is a hard-earned luxury. We romanticize nationalism, glorify violence in cinema, and engage in communal rhetoric, often forgetting that real war leaves no winners—only bodies, silence, and generations of grief.
To truly appreciate peace, India must reckon with the weight of war. Not through manufactured conflict, but through a deeper understanding of what it means to lose someone, to live with the ache of absence, to smell the stench of death in the streets. Only then can we learn to cherish what we have. Only then will we understand that peace isn’t the default—it’s a choice, a responsibility, and above all, a sacrifice.