Satyarthi & Malala are peace warriors

Even as the official exchanges between India and Pakistan find it hard to extricate the narrative from long-term mutual suspicion, and as guns and bombs of terrorists with roots across the border seek to create mayhem to disrupt the democratic process in Kashmir, a 60-year old Indian, Kailash Satyarthi, and Malala Yousazai, a Pakistani girl who is no more than 17, gave their orations in Oslo on Wednesday as joint winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for peace, in which they didn’t ask for the impossible.

They merely made appeals from the heart to educate the world’s children and free them from bondage and despair. The need was for “transformative compassion”, as Mr Satyarthi put it, and quoted Gandhi to say that if the message of real peace was to be realised in the world, we must begin with children. The most terrible violence was that which squelched children’s dreams, the champion of saving childhoods urged the world.

At an alarming 60 million, India reportedly has a third of the world’s children in bondage, some in intergenerational bondage, and it is their cause that Mr Satyarthi has served for some two decades. His appeal from Oslo, as he received his prize, was to liberate them, feed them, educate them, and set them free to work on their dreams.

The Indian stalwart of saving childhoods reminded governments that if a mere one week of world military spending was cut, the money freed could put all of the world’s children into classrooms. He urged governments to put more money into education and called on businesses to come up with innovative ideas to achieve that end.

What was important in Mr Satyarthi’s message to “globalise compassion” for children was the question of agency. The solution was not confined to governments and inter-government agencies, but depended to a great extent on individual initiatives. His clearest message: Every minute counts, every child counts, every childhood counts.

The Indian laureate urged people to rise above neutrality in this matter, and his Pakistani counterpart, still a girl who fights with her brothers (as she informed her audience), seemed the very embodiment of his message. She said once the terrorists destroyed 400 schools in her region and began to attack girls, the choice before her was to remain silent and be killed or speak up and be killed. The boldness of this heroic Pashtun girl’s imagination is clear from her message — that education is life’s necessity and must not be withheld from any child anywhere in the world.