The tormented region called South Asia

Columnist Dr S M RAHMAN talks about the problems of the sub-continent.

Karl Marx often made profound statements. Speaking to a gathering of a Christian church, he remarked: “You Christians, have a vested interest in unjust structures, which produce victims to whom you then can pour out hearts in charity. Charity, no doubt, is a virtue loaded word, but it can never be a substitute for Justice. Peace without justice is a mirage. The alms givers, do not care to ponder why is charity necessary? Islam lays emphasis on creating social system of kind that there would be no beggars to seek charity. The fault lies in structures - global and national - which perpetuate poverty, creating intolerable conditions, and finally breeding culture of violence. Ironically, culture of peace is rendered an utopian wish, outside the pale of economic order, which is designed to profit the ‘profiteers’ the money launders, currency and stock speculators, who are driven by no other motive except greed and rapacity. Humanitarian sensibility is on the wane. The world has always operated an Hobbesian paradigm, but the 21st century, far from minimizing human miseries, alleviating poverty, undermining tensions, is likely to accentuate these, as it will go to further enhance the power of the powerful and to augment the wealth of the affluent nations of the world. South Asia’s future is bleak and dismal, unless imperatives of the new economic order are fully comprehended and a joint strategy of the developing nations is envisaged to cope up with the new realities and to bend globalization for the greater good of humanity.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has made some predictions with respect to some of the major countries in South Asia, during the current century. The projection is based on the development level achieved by forty five countries, in which the last on the list is Costa Rica. To be able to reach up to this level, Sri Lanka would have to wait till 2015; Pakistan 2084; India 2090 and Bangladesh 2135. These predictions depict indeed a very morbid scenario, and what can compound the predicament if national calamities like, famine, drought and flood contribute their part of the share, not to speak of the man-made disasters - insurgencies, state terrorism, or much publicized strategic fad - limited warfare - or the nuclear holocaust. The last one would serve the nail in the coffin of South Asia.

Viewed purely in economic terms, both India and Pakistan would need excruciating long waiting to come upto Costa Rica level, and by the time, this status is attained, the former would leap-frog, to even a higher pedestal of growth. Its present pace of growth, calculated as per capita GNP, is over $ 2780; whereas for India and Pakistan it is abysmally low - $430 and $ 480 respectively. Sri Lanka, presents relatively a better picture, as with its per capita GNP of $800, it can aspire to improve the quality of the lives of its people, provided it is freed from the menace of ‘insurgency’, which is a great impediment to its prosperity. Should luck prevail, it could emerge as a model for India and Pakistan to emulate, particularly to push up Human Development Indices to a respectable level. It is indeed encouraging that Sri Lanka spends 1.3 percent of its GNP on Health and 3.6% on Education, while both India and Pakistan spend only 0.9% on Health, and 2.2% and 3.4% on Education respectively. Mahbubul Haq in his briefing on Human Development Report 1994, makes a sad depiction of the developing world: Soldiers out-number doctors by a ratio of 20 to 1, in the developing world as a whole. Yet the chances of dying from diseases and social neglect are 33 times higher in the developing world than the chances of dying in a war. Such senseless accentuation of arms has ensured neither the security of the people nor of their nations. In 1980 Iraq spent 8 times as much on military as on social development. Somalia 5 times and Nicaragua 3 times; by 1990 these countries were beginning to disintegrate. On the other hand Costa Rica invested one third of its income in the education, health and nutrition of its people and nothing at all on its army, which it had abolished in 1948. Not surprisingly, Costa Rica has survived as the only prospering democracy in the otherwise troubled Central American region.

South Asia, it appears, has gone in the reverse gear. The colonial rule, though has a negative overtone of political slavery, but it had laid sound base like infrastructures conducive to speedier social and economic development. The road and rail links had made communication network fairly effective, besides there existed other channels like radio and telephones. The educational institutions were organized on modern lines, and very prestigious institutions for higher learning were operating. Agriculture had well developed, canal system and industrial set ups showed promise of marked development. In other words, the subcontinent, had very strong and relatively corruption free institutions - legal, administrative and legislative. It can be said with a fair amount of certainty that among the developing countries, this region was gifted with the highest potential to take the leadership role. But it was indeed a sad state of affairs that the post 1947 era saw this dream shattered. Economic cooperation was sacrificed at the alter of power, and the two nations have remained on confrontational path, cumulatively accentuating mistrust and hostility. They have fought three wars, besides a running battle on the line of control, in Kashmir, which alone has taken in its toll, thousands of human casualties that one shudders to think, how human beings can stoop to such a degraded level of brutish mentality. Kashmir, presents a frightening prospect of a nuclear dual between the two neighbours - one on account of size, resources and enormous paraphernalia of weapons and equipment - both conventional and of mass destruction - is a Goliath and Pakistan conversely a David. But war in human history has not always been a game of numbers. Intangibles force multiply, particularly when principles take precedence over passion for empire building. Vietnam and Afghanistan would have had no place in history, if military power were the only determinant of success. What is intended to convey is that any war limited or otherwise will render both the victor and the vanquished only a matter of semantic interest, but for all practical purposes, the gloom would be all pervasive and intensely paralyzing.

India, no doubt, has made progress in diverse fields of science and technology, particularly in Informatics, its achievement is commendable. Its economic growth rate may be to some extent self-assuring but it cannot camouflage the reality, that out of its billion population, more than 400 million are living below the poverty line. In a system, where economic growth does not trickle down to the majority of its people, the country can hardly be characterized respectable, far less to be an aspirant of the coveted seat of permanent membership in the Security Council - the custodian of security and justice to the nations of the world. It would be ironic indeed that a country which does not provide economic security to a vast chunk of its own people, and denies the people of Kashmir the right of self-determination - UN commitment through resolutions - gets support from USA, France, UK and Russia for such a great honour. If at all it is brought into effect it would be at the cost of total erosion of the credibility of the UN body, which is already controversial due to the exclusive command and control over it exercised by the world’s lone super power — USA, and the monopoly of few nations over the affairs of the world, through their veto rights. It is incongruent to democratic values and as such anachronistic in nature. Institutions robbed of justice tend to become sterile and purposeless.

It is estimated that the world has spent nearly $ 16 trillion dollars for military purposes since World War II. According to Ruth Sivard, the world’s annual military budget equals the annual income of 2.6 billion people in the 44 poorest nations. She also calculated that the world spends 2,900 times as much on national military force as on international peace keeping forces and that the cost of one aircraft carrier (Nimitz class) is $3,900,000,000, which equals one solid meal a day for 6 months for the 20 million Americans, which do not get enough to eat. If one takes into account the cost of a war, it is phenomenally high. Even the tiny war, which was Vietnam had put USA on borrowed money binge, that lingered till very late. Similarly the cost of the Gulf War which the Arab nations had to foot the bill is incredibly high, bringing their oil wealth to a miserably low level. If India and Pakistan had not fought wars, the economic dividend would have appreciably altered the quality of the lives of the peoples of the two countries. It is a singular tragedy that those who profit from wars or preparations thereof, are arms producers - whom President Eisenhower used to refer as military industrial complex. It is but logical that those who thrive on the booming business of the instruments of death should be selectively creating conflicts by advancing clash-of-civilization, thesis.

The report on the Commission on Global Governance makes it explicit that between 1970 and the end of cold war in 1989, weapons worth $168 billion were transferred to the Middle East, $ 65 billion worth to Africa, $ 61 billion to the Far East, $ 50 billion to South Asia, and $ 44 billion to Latin America. The Soviet Union and the United States accounted for 69 percent of $ 388 billion total. The surfeit of weapons especially small arms, left over from this era is a key enabling factor in many conflicts now scarring the world. It is also a patent reality to be taken into serious consideration by the South Asia’s strategic thinkers that nations these days are more prone to disintegration from within rather than through overt external aggression. During the last few years, out of 82 conflicts, 79 had their roots in the internal disparities, marginalizing of ethnic and other minorities and felt deprivations of people within their own countries. South Asia, let us admit, in all humility, is infested with vulnerabilities. There are the real issues which cannot be put under the rug. Perceptions must be guided to create an attitudinal commitment to collectively muster resources for salvaging South Asia, from its deplorable plight, even in the Asian context. There is no other option but to create supranational organization for regional economic cooperation, which without compromising on sovereignty and distinct identity of individual nations, must strive to attain what European Union remarkably did, despite conflicts, and hostilities nurtured over centuries, and the nations divided among themselves with fifteen different languages. South Asia is far more homogenous than is Europe, in terms of languages, laws and institutions.

It is necessary for India to play a major role in the uplift of South Asia through first creating conditions of mutual trust. Obduracy not to talk over Kashmir, would expedite South Asian catastrophe. The perceptions based on mutual hatred and mistrust, must be relinquished to usher in an era of prosperity, by transcending narrow nationalism and erroneous notion of building strategic culture, which Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh is so obsessed with in his recent book Defending India. His perceptions about China is indeed quite faulty. He stated: The Chinese strategic culture remain what it has always been wedded to domination... It is not so. A country which builds Great Wall cannot be an empire builder. Similarly Pakistan is not what Jawaharlal Nehru had depicted. He had maintained that the resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute would not bring peace and amity to the subcontinent, because Indo-Pakistan to secular progressive India. History has outrightly contradicted it. All the elections held in Pakistan testify that the people have voted for moderate ideological orientation. The so-called fanatics and fundamentalists, miserably failed at the polls, whereas in India, the myth of secularism is exposed by the frightful emergence of the latent Hindutva sensibility. But it should not be a cause for pessimism. Efforts must be mobilized towards what Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes only very recently expressed: India and Pakistan should commit themselves to resolving disputes through dialogue based on mutual trust. The two countries can work together for economic development and garner their natural resources for human reality. This must transcend from rhetoric to reality as the vision teaches us that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but as well, the presence of justice, as someone rightly said: Let justice roll down like mighty waters.