Source: The Nation, Wednesday, July 7, 1999 / Opinion
South Asia: a plea for peace
by Ahson Saeed Hasan
The never-ending process of an incremental defence build-up in the
Indo-Pak Subcontinent, in the name of security at the cost of human
development, welfare and prosperity of the masses, will have to be,
sooner, no matter what the ground situation, carefully scrutinized and a
balance struck between perceived military threats and the real risk of a
dramatic economic crash.
While the rest of the world heads towards peace and tranquillity, India
and Pakistan would not know it. Despite the crushing poverty of their
respective populations, the two countries are spending approximately $
30 billion a year on defence, twice as much as Saudi Arabia, a country
25 times wealthier. Both countries have six times more soldiers than
doctors, in a region where epidemics, disease, starvation and death are
rampant.
How tragically comic that after bleeding their economies, the two
governments, despite high and lofty slogans of breaking their respective
begging bowls, continue to beg and submit to all sorts of
conditionalities from IMF, World Bank and other international lending
institutions.
Some say that there is need for a balance of terror in South Asia. If
people are sleeping on pavements, While children suffocate in windowless
classrooms nations have no strength when their people starve, groan and
grieve under immense economic pressures and hardships.
With India and Pakistan leading the way, South Asia trails behind while
the rest of the developing world surges ahead. 800 million South Asians
do without elementary sanitation, fully 380 million are illiterate, and
300 million drink from ponds rather than taps.
South Asia is just not prepared to enter the 21st century. It does not
invest enough in its people. India hopes to be a regional superpower,
but cannot become one with the scale of sheer poverty that exists. The
lesson of Cold War rivalry is not that capitalism triumphed over
communism, but that political power not backed by economic strength is
unsustainable. The Soviet Union collapsed because it could not feed its
people. All its tanks, submarines and secret service meant nothing in
the ultimate analysis.
Beyond the issue of India's role in the region is the question of what
ought to constitute the envisaged South Asian identity. It has been said
with some degree of cynicism that the only common factor between all the
countries in the region is the negative one of the high level of
poverty. Economic policies being pursued in the region are unlikely to
improve the conditions of the vast majorities in these countries. It may
also be mentioned here that the defence budgets of the region devour an
overwhelming amount of revenues, followed by loan servicing and
maintenance of a huge inefficient bureaucracy, with very little left for
the social sector. For instance, Pakistan's military spending for the
year 1996-97 was Rs. 115 billion. This means spending Rs. 316 every day,
Rs. 13 million every hour, Rs. 219,280 every minute and Rs. 3,654 every
second, on the military. A day's saving on military spending can be
spent on the development of one city. Its costs about a million rupees
to build a primary school in a village. By saving on arms we can pay for
building over 100,000 schools in one year. It costs Rs. 219,280 to
install a new tubewell for a village. By saving on arms we can pay for
installing over half a million tubewells in one year.
Economic growth is not enough; there has to be distributive justice.
Three decades ago, Pakistan had one of the highest rates of growth in
the developing world - seven per cent a year. So why were people
protesting on the streets? The reason was that economic growth had not
touched their lives - Income distribution was skewed against the poor.
The lesson was clear: you have to stop worshipping the goddess of
growth. Put people at the centre, enrich their lives, and provide them
with options.
Amidst all the gloom, South Asia itself provides examples of the
dynamism that can be released when human lives are made the focus. In
Bangalore, once they started training people in computers, the industry
took off and India is now the second largest exporter of software in the
world. India presently sells $ one billion worth of software; by the
year 2000 the figure may reach five billion. Before 1971, what was then
East Pakistan, did not have significant industry. Today Bangladesh has
out-competed India and Pakistan; it exports $2 billion worth of garments
to North America and Europe.
India and Pakistan must take the lead and turn South Asia away from the
abyss. The SAARC organisation has remained an exercise in protocol
without substance. Beyond the realm of mutual distrust and consensual
antagonism, SAARC must be energized and revitalized. Instead of issuing
utopian declarations at the culmination of each meeting, a down-to-earth
approach should be adopted. Each member of SAARC must agree under a
multilateral agreement to cut five per cent of military spending
annually, and to earmark the money released for education and health.
Having proved beyond doubt that they are established nuclear powers,
India and Pakistan must also come to an understanding on the nuclear
issue. Now is the time to act in a sensible, rational and prudent
manner, sit down and talk about 'human' and 'social' issues, so that the
enormous resources can become available for social needs.
The existing political structures of India and Pakistan are not
conditioned to accept proposals such as these. For this reason, the
people should take the lead, through energetic advocacy and use of the
increasingly powerful and borderless media. It is time for civil society
to conduct a 'bypass operation' around reluctant politicians, who are
never willing to stake their lives and reputations for social justice.
Those who seek to restore normal dialogue and bring down the walls that
separate people, can begin from a base that has survived years of undue,
tension and confrontation. Participants in the Indos-Pakistan People's
Forum, for example, or the Neemrana initiative, recognize a simple
truth, that political obstacles to a normalization of relations will be
removed only by a demonstration of popular will by ordinary citizens.
Today, the people of both sides of the divide have the opportunity to
replace the language of confrontation with the vocabulary of
reconciliation, to bring the sufferings of the Kashmiri people to an
end, to reverse the economic deterioration of a region with enormous
potential and to join the rest of the world in dealing with the threat
we inevitably face and the promise we can all share.
Of course, there are tremendous vested interests in the power structures
of the two countries. There is little understanding of the social
opportunity costs of buying more and more sophisticated armaments. But
why should we assume these are immutable?
Everywhere outside our subcontinent, people are leading change, which
comes about much faster today because ideas cross borders much more
easily. We should, therefore, let the talk of missile development and
nuclear proliferation give way to talk of human development. Let the job
of building confidence begin and the history of mistrust and suspicion
come to an end. Let the great civilization of this extraordinary part of
the world flourish once again. Let the voice of its poets speak of
peace. Let merchants and traders of business interact ; let goods flow
freely between markets. Most important, let our children live, without
fear and without rancour, united in hope, speaking the common language
of a people at peace with themselves.
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