When Bengaluru’s peace activist E.P. Menon walked from Delhi to Washington 60 years ago Premium

In this exclusive to The Hindu with Praveen Sudevan, author and peace activist E.P. Menon recalls his cross-border walk tour in 1962 with his friend Satish Kumar and talks about his concerns about the world.

In September 1961, English philosopher and Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell received a seven-day imprisonment in London for “refusing to keep the peace.” The 89-year-old philosopher was then leading a British campaign against nuclear arms. 

Several thousand miles away, in Bengaluru, two friends — E.P. Menon and Satish Kumar — were upset by this development. Over coffee, they discussed how to persuade governments to ban nuclear weapons and prioritise peace instead. The conversation resulted in a crazy idea. “Let’s walk from Delhi to Washington, stopping at Paris, London, and Moscow.” To get the world’s leaders to listen to them, this craziness was required.

Menon and Kumar set off for their pilgrimage of peace on June 1, 1962, from Rajghat, a memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi.

Six decades since that incredible journey, Menon, who was at KarnatakaChitrakala Parishath last week to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of artist and peace activist Paul Robeson, recollected the most memorable moment from it. “When we went to Moscow, the Soviet Union head, [Nikita] Khrushchev, was happy. He promised to enter the nuclear disarmament agreement with American President John F. Kennedy. He said, ‘I am ready. Please go and get Kennedy.’ That was a total commitment from the Russian government. We were happy about that. When we reached New York, Kennedy was not there. He was shot dead.”

“It was a walk from Gandhi’s grave to Kennedy’s,” his friend, Kumar, would later recount in his book, Pilgrimage For Peace.

A lot has changed since Menon’s eventful international tour. The danger of a nuclear apocalypse might not seem as imminent as it did during the Cold War years. The world, he said, is, however, spending a lot of its resources on defence: to make guns, airplanes, and military weapons.

“Some time ago, I saw a news article about a schoolboy carrying a gun in his backpack. This gun culture is a problem in America. President [Joe] Biden is trying to stop it. Will he be allowed to stop it? It is a problem for America and the rest of the world.”