Tigers vs elephants: New transitions in ASEAN's wake

Tigers vs elephants: New transitions in ASEAN's wake

India and South Africa have both taken a keen interest in the
developmental experience and economic opportunities of the ASEAN
region. Amyn B. Sajoo looks at two critiques of the changes
taking place in these two countries.

SINGAPORE: Delivering the annual Singapore Lecture on a
whirlwind tour of the region early this year, South African
President Nelson Mandela struck a pilgrim's note. "We have come
to learn about how the bonds that you forged among countries of
South-east Asia served as a spur to this economic miracle of our
times ... about the plodding industry that it took to develop
your human resources and advance your technological base."

Indeed, a bevy of senior political visitors from sub-Saharan
Africa have found the ASEAN trail de riguer - even as South Asia
seeks closer partnering with a group whose dynamism has attracted
warm plaudits from sober bureaucrats at the World Bank and the
IMF. True, there have been hiccups for ASEAN members in the
currency markets, and concern about their role in the Cambodian
imbroglio as well as the admission of Myanmar to their ranks.

But at age 30 and with a total population of more than 480
million, the association enjoys enough clout for Washington and
the European Union to call - and listen - on a regular basis.
That is conspicuously more than the rest of post-colonial Asia,
Africa or Latin America can manage at this juncture.

Mandela's stature at home and abroad is remarkable, yet he was
suitably wistful in Singapore about the regional integration and
cachet of the Southern African Development Community when
compared with ASEAN. Meanwhile in South Asia, as India and
Pakistan celebrate their respective 50th anniversary of
independence, a meaningful regional grouping remains elusive.

The "ASEAN transition formula" of export-led growth, high
domestic savings, strong investment in education and effective
governance has become a mantra for the World Bank and other
multilateral agencies. But as Cal Clark and KC Roy argue in their
recent book, Comparing Development Patterns in Asia, neo-
classical economic formulas alone will not do the trick. Socio-
cultural attitudes and political priorities are integral to the
transitional quest.

Two new books on India and South Africa offer timely critiques
of the social as well as economic changes underway in societies
that share ASEAN's diversity and deep historical legacies - and
whose success will impact powerfully on their respective regions.

Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India
(Doubleday, 306pp) sketches the acute contradictions of tradition
and modernity that pervade a land of 17 official languages, a
host of religious traditions, and complex caste divisions. India
today has the world's 10th largest industrial sector, growing out
of the textile mills that fueled Gandhi's anti-colonial struggle.

Yet a country whose predominantly rural population depends so
heavily on agriculture relies frequently on farming techniques as
ancient as the Ramayana epic. While there is also a cutting-edge
cultivation of grains pioneered by Indian researchers, these
pockets only attest to the radical unevenness of change.

Again, a burgeoning computer software industry that works with
and challenges California's Silicon Valley co-exists with the
reality that more than half the population is illiterate. This
when India's writers have taken the literary world by storm:
Vikram Chandra, Amitav Gosh, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Vikram
Seth and Gita Mehta herself are household names from New York to
Sydney.

ASEAN's huge investment in basic education has no equal in
South Asia. Instead, annual defense spending has absorbed shares
of gross national product (GNP) that boggle the mind. Mehta
recommends a forced mass literacy program, in part as a weapon to
promote social justice for the least privileged. But one recalls
Indira Gandhi's forced birth-control schemes, which failed in
themselves and symptomized a bullying political culture that
Indians shrugged off in 1977.

The expectations of an immense and fast-growing middle class
linked by travel, television and the Internet to the consumer
societies of East and South-east Asia will not easily fit into
the prevailing political culture either. Despite changes wrought
by Prime Minister Inder Gujral and earlier by the liberalizing
finance minister Manmohan Singh, Indian democracy is shot through
with old patterns of corruption, cronyism and communalism. There
is some reassurance in the media's vigor in exposing those
practices.

Recent outbreaks of religious fundamentalism have turned out
to be more than a flash in the pan as Hindu-based parties wield
power in Bombay (renamed Mumbai) and beyond, against a rich
heritage of social tolerance. Rapid economic change is used and
opposed by the fundamentalists. They are eager to embrace new
means of communications to reach distant audiences, then
manipulate caste and creed to advance vested political and
economic interests.

Their much publicized campaign against Kentucky Fried Chicken
as "unhygienic" is truly absurd in a country where the drinking
water can be lethal. Such energies might usefully be directed at
land reform and health care for the multitudes in abject poverty.

Snakes and Ladders captures in its title the mix of India's
frequent vaulting over "painful stages experienced by other
countries, lifted by ladders we had no right to expect" - and the
"snakes of past nightmares" that pulled life back to square one.
Mehta's short essays on disparate topics are deft and evocative
like her 1980 international bestseller, Karma Cola, on the
marketing of Indian spirituality in the West.

No less adroit is Patti Waldmeir, the Johannesburg bureau
chief of the London Financial Times from 1989 to 1995, in Anatomy
of a Miracle (WW Norton, 303 pp). For Waldmeir, South Africa's
ability to contain and harness the inheritances of a half century
of apartheid into what is by far the most successful transition
in sub-Saharan Africa defies all the odds.

Yes, the country has immense diamond and gold deposits,
tourist attractions and fertile soils that sprout vineyards and
fruit farms to rival the Mediterranean. Apartheid's overseers
built an industrial sector of considerable sophistication -
partly as a bulwark against trade and investment sanctions - on
the backs of cheap black labor. They also created an
infrastructure generally in advance of anything on the continent.

But the pundits saw nothing short of civil wars on the eve of
Nelson Mandela's release after 27 years in prison in 1990, when
ethnic strife had already gripped the post-Cold War world. It
simmered in the claims of Afrikaner nationalists descended from
Dutch settlers of the 18th century, the Zulus dominant in Natal
province (with its sizable Indian population), and "Bantustans"
or enclaves created to divide blacks along tribal lines.

By contrast, Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) was
reminiscent of Malaysia's Umno or India's Congress Party in
seeking to accommodate ethnic and ideological interests. In the
fateful years between 1990 and 1994, before elections brought the
ANC to power, constitutional wrangles and entrenched white
economic power constantly threatened to scuttle the transition
altogether. An exodus of skilled Asians and whites had started.

The pragmatism of both the outgoing white National Party under
Prime Minister FW de Klerk, and the erstwhile ANC elite that
learned hard lessons from the many failures of post-colonial
Africa, was critical. It further helped that alternative power
centers - like the churches, unions, chiefs and influential
corporate leaders who prized stability - often mediated conflict.

However, it is no exaggeration to suggest that Mandela's own
combination of Gandhian principles and cool calculation was a key
to South Africa's peaceful transformation. For all the personal
friction between him and De Klerk, the latter's "courage to leap"
into what must have seemed to many of his white compatriots like
an abyss likely came from the assurance of Mandela's integrity.

Even the Zulu leader Buthelezi, Mandela's nemesis since 1990,
has been largely co-opted. And the new political leaders - Thabo
Mbeki (who takes over as President in December), Cyril Ramophosa
and Roelf Meyer, among others - have learned well. As Waldmeir
sees it, the spirit of ubuntu, or eliciting the humanity in
others, infects enough people to keep them fighting the odds
rather than each other.

South Africa's economic performance is not quite tigerish, but
per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is ahead of China, India,
the Philippines and Russia. After a sharp slowdown linked to the
fall in gold prices, the growth rate is ascendant again. Blacks
are quickly joining the corporate establishment at the topmost
levels. Education is a priority in state budgets, and some of the
universities offer world class programs.

There is, understandably, room aplenty for discontent. The
rule of law is especially shaky in urban centers, with crime
rates in Cape Town and Johannesburg well ahead of New York's.
Illiteracy among blacks is at 46 percent, compared with one per
cent for whites. Land rights are a perennial issue, and squatters
rife. Poverty runs deep in politically-conscious black townships.

Nonetheless, South Africa's thriving civil society - like
India's - offers much hope. Judging by his pilgrimages, Nelson
Mandela is keenly aware of the dangers of complacency and the
need to foster robust ties with transitional Asia. At the same
time, the country's success would have a ripple effect all the
way to Central Africa, ushering in fresh pastures for the tigers
and elephants, old and new.

Dr. Amyn B. Sajoo was the author at ISEAS of Pluralism in Old
Societies and New States: Emerging ASEAN Contexts (1994). He is
currently an independent consultant based in Vancouver.