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2 South Asia's schizophrenic
twins By Chan Akya
Reading through the various valedictory,
overly critical and self-congratulatory articles
on 60 years of independence for India and Pakistan
this week, it becomes apparent that the media
largely lack the courage to discuss the main
issues confronting the two nations. Instead, the
focus has overwhelmingly been on the cosmetic
symptoms that are displayed by the disease in
question.
In my opinion, this would be the
abysmal economic record of the
two
countries for the past 60 years that has been the
dominant factor in the continued socio-political
strife, diplomatic snafus and wars. The lack of
economic growth in these two countries over the
first 50 years of independence weighed on their
domestic politics, security and, eventually, every
element of the socio-political milieu.
Just after the Korean War, South Korea had
a per capita income lower than India's. Fifty
years later (and despite the effects of the 1997
Asian crisis), the country boasts an income more
than 10 times India's. The magic of compound
interest applies to economies as well - grow an
economy at 5% every year, and it doubles in size
in slightly less than 15 years; do it at 8% and it
does it in just over nine years. Or put
differently, the second economy would have tripled
in size in the same time that the first doubled.
Much of the economic mess in the
subcontinent can be laid at the door of two
forces: feudal chiefs in the case of Pakistan and
communist leaders in the case of India.
Multilateral agencies such as the World Bank
estimate that fewer than 500 families control more
than three-quarters of Pakistan's resources. These
powerful families have a blatant disregard for the
laws of Pakistan, and express open disgust at
democracy, often citing India's rambunctious
politics as a justification. This corralling of
power away from the poor and middle classes has
left the military as the only national institution
in Pakistan, which in turn explains its
stranglehold on power.
In the absence of
economic growth and political expression, the poor
in Pakistan have turned increasingly to Islamic
parties, especially from the mid-1980s. [1] While
the nominal facade is religious, the ultimate
objectives of many such political groupings are
very much on the lines of communism, ie, an
"equitable" redistribution of wealth. However, it
is fair also to point out that Islamic parties
across South Asia have been hijacked over the past
few years by pseudo-nationalist forces aiming
primarily to preserve the status quo favoring the
very rich in each country.
India embarked
on land reforms in the first few years after
independence, thereby blunting the power of its
feudal lords, but the victory was short-lived.
Ill-thought-out socialist policies reduced
economic growth from the second half of the 1950s,
which in turn perpetuated the poverty suffered by
hundreds of millions.
Combined with rising
income disparities, the political framework ended
up handing power to communist leaders, a term I
use to describe the heads of all Indian
political parties. These politicians come in
different hues, but much like the French political
system today, even the most right-wing of Indian
politician looks like a socialist to me. From that
perspective, branding the whole lot as communists
does not appear an oversimplification of the
current environment.
Communism is of
course deadly for the economy, and one needs to
look no further than the record for India in the
1960s and 1970s to explain the matter. Removing
the entrepreneurial urges of a people once
renowned for it is no mean achievement, after all.
The pernicious impact of communist leaders in
India has also been to push government bureaucrats
rather than businessmen to the forefront of policy
discussions.
Increased corruption was the
easy result of such misguided policies, [2] more
so in India than in Pakistan, mainly because one
had to bribe a lot more people in the former to
get anything done. Thus, irrespective of political
hue, all political parties in India became
increasingly corrupt over the past 20-odd years,
in essence serving the same vested interests
(businessmen) they were meant to combat.
Anti-incumbency has become a permanent feature of
the Indian political system as a result, with
elections every five years or so inevitably
bringing a new political party into power and,
with it, a long list of supplicants and their own
peevish demands.
Social changes ... or
not The deeply ingrained Islamic nature of
Pakistani society has allowed relative social
stability for much of the past 60 years. Even so,
fissures on ethnic lines have deepened mainly
because of economic strains. The dominance of the
Punjab [3] in Pakistani economics (and military)
resulted in deep divisions that eventually caused
the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 and now
threaten other provinces, especially the
desperately poor ones on the border with
Afghanistan.
In any economy growing
slowly, demand for resources piles up in a
geometric fashion as the existing infrastructure
begins to creak under the weight of
non-maintenance. That is the central feature of
both India and Pakistan, but appears more acute in
the non-Punjab parts of Pakistan. The intense envy
thus evoked spilled over into the Bangladeshi
movement in the 1960s, for example. Higher
economic-growth rates, along with dedicated
government focus on expanding the state's
infrastructure, would have done much to keep
Pakistan in one piece.
India had a
different experience in this matter. Free mobility
of people within the country allowed the expansion
of labor-intensive industries in the western part
of the country, and gradually across the rest of
the north. Much like Pakistan's focus on the
Punjab, successive Indian governments lavished
attention on the largest
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