Electorate to change govts' priorities

By Jonathan Power

BHURBAN, Pakistan (JP): Two dogs met on the Indo-Pakistani border. The Indian dog was making for Pakistan and the Pakistani dog heading for India. "Why are you going in the other direction?" they asked each other. The Indian dog replied, "I need to eat." The Pakistani dog said, "I need to bark."

As the most peaceful general election in India's 50-year democratic history unfolds the story sounds rather dated. Democracy continues to thrive in India, but it is also now in place in once-dictatorial Pakistan.

Similarly, although Pakistan continues, as usual, with its regular and significant annual increases in national income, giving it an income per head of more than double India's, India is now set to catch up. Under the present Congress-led government, much-delayed economic reforms have unshackled the economy from what used to be mockingly called "the Hindu growth rate".

Nevertheless, there is a story to be told in both countries -- of those who are being left behind. The middle and upper working classes may be doing rather well, but the proletariat and much, though not all, (the Indian Punjak and Kerala are important exceptions) of the peasantry and the landless are mired in the deepest poverty.

Without some profound political and economic changes in spending priorities even rapid growth will do little for this underclass -- the largest concentration of poor in the world. There are 380 million illiterates (two-thirds of them females), 280 million have no access to safe drinking water and 850 million lack elementary sanitation services. Over 300 million live in absolute poverty at the lowest margin of existence.

Politically, the problem is the enormous albatross of over- high military spending. Too much of both countries' scarce resources is consumed on the pyre of their mutual antagonism, a fire that is going to be stoked even higher if, as the polls appear to suggest, the Hindu nationalists, the Bharatiya Janata Party, become India's largest political party in the next parliament.

Every year the two countries spend a colossal US$20 billion on defense. Military spending in South Asia has been increasing by about 4 percent a year over the last decade, the same rate as global spending has been falling.

The real enemy of the majority of the peoples of both countries is not the other country but their own poverty. It is poverty that is curtailing their lives, prolonging their illnesses, killing off their children, stunting the potential of their women and destroying their environment. However, none of the political leaders who've held power in recent years have been able to bring this into sharp enough focus, so influential are the ultra-nationalist forces in both camps.

It was partly for this reason that a group of Pakistani thinkers, leavened by some guests from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and outside the subcontinent, met in Bhurban in the Himalayan foothills recently to try and work out some policy options that could change the paradigms of the debate.

In part sponsored by the Islamabad-based Human Development Center and in part by Mikhail Gorbachev's State of the World Forum it brought together not just those one might expect to see, like the brilliant Pakistani economist, Javed Burki, vice president of the World Bank but also the reclusive father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, Ahmad Munir Khan and Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, chief of the armed forces for the late dictator, Zia ul Haq.

Thus, when a consensus emerged around a declaration -- the Bhurban Statement -- that called for a new vision "where people are put at the very center of development" and arms cuts demanded so that each country "should earmark at least 20 percent of its national budget so as to ensure the universal coverage of basic social services," it will, I think, have a resonance that could carry it further than most bits of paper.

Pakistan and India need imagination and political will in that order -- the imagination to see how to arrange a better life than the nuclear confrontation spawned by their aging quarrel over Kashmir and the political will to divert resources consumed by a military machine that is grinding tens of millions of people in both countries exceedingly small.

Only when the electorates feel strong enough to resist the will of the present leadership and vote to implement what is for a majority their true immediate self-interest will change occur.

Fortunately, in this Indian election there have been some welcoming signs of this maturing of the electorate. In its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, low caste Hindus who not long ago were in the pocket of their landlords are now standing for office. In Pakistan younger people in particular are being drawn to the banner of former cricket star Imran Khan, who is challenging both of the traditional political parties.

This suggests that change may come from below. If only the present political elite could reach down and meet it half way. It would save a lot of time -- and torment.