History’s many burdens

By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 25 Aug, 2009

MOST regions carry the weight of history. For many of them the weight is heavy. In this respect South Asia is not all that much different from many other parts of the world. The only difference is that while other regions have been able to find ways to cast off these burdens, South Asia still carries them in the 21st century.

This is unfortunate since this is likely to be a century of change with significant realignments among the world’s large economies. For South Asia to gain a position in the fast-changing global system it will have to resolve some of the many inter-country conflicts that have bedevilled the region for so long. How several world regions managed to cast off the burdens of history has lessons for South Asia, in particular for India and Pakistan.

Since a great deal can be written — in fact has been written — on the subject of persistent inter-country conflicts in South Asia, I will say little on this subject and from a very different angle. My preference is to call this subject the burden of history. I call it a burden since it is my view that the weight the South Asians have carried for decades needs to be lifted if the region is to realise its considerable economic potential.

One important point to be made in this context is that the purpose of delving into history is not to open old wounds. These wounds were inflicted as a result of the deep suspicions in the way the South Asians looked at one another. The reason why that has happened is that the past is interpreted by every country from its own perspective. The South Asians are like the various players in Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese drama Rashomon where several people see the same crime committed but tell it from their own perspective. There is a great need for countries to develop a common historical narrative.

Rewriting the history of South Asia should start with a recognition of how in the distant past as well as in the more recent present complex societies managed to shed their differences and work together for the common good of the citizenry.

Sometimes this happened because enlightened leaders emerged simultaneously in different places and were able to look beyond the past and convince their people that working with neighbours had greater rewards for them than labouring against them. Sometimes the impulse for integration was generated by the realisation that past conflicts had been extremely costly and continuing them was not in anybody’s interest.

A great deal has gone wrong in the South Asian region because of the way India and Pakistan looked at each other. Being almost paranoid in their perception of the other’s intentions, they have cost the area a great deal in terms of lost opportunities.

These “what if…” exercises — what would have happened had the countries behaved differently towards each other, for instance — are difficult to quantify. However, based on some of the earlier work by me on these lines and concerning the cost to Pakistan vis-à-vis the Kashmir dispute, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that had India and Pakistan not been so obsessed with each other and had not spent so much on their respective militaries, their combined GDP may have increased by as much as two percentage points each year.

Compounded over so many years this is not a trivial amount. But for the concentration of so much energy against each other, India and Pakistan today would have much larger economies, a far higher income per capita and fewer people living in absolute poverty. It appears that India is breaking out of this mould and Pakistan may be similarly disposed. But the two countries have been doing this for different reasons.

For India, its continuing obsession with Pakistan is costing it a more prominent place in the global economy and the evolving international political system. For Pakistan, the realisation appears to have finally dawned that the country’s real enemy exists within its borders and not on the other side of its frontier. If this reading is correct the economic rewards will come sooner for India than for Pakistan since the latter will remain engaged with its internal enemies for a while. That said, by redefining the threat to its security, Pakistan could set itself on a very different course.

Although economists have ignored the dividends of regional peace in identifying the determinants of growth for the ‘miracle economies’ of East Asia, the fact remains that the absence of inter-country conflict in this area was an important contributor to economic growth. This could happen in South Asia if its various conflicts get resolved. Among them are the long-enduring suspicions between Afghanistan and Pakistan which I will comment on in a later article.

Here, I recall a conversation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his New Delhi office in December 2005. I had gone to see him to discuss the study I was then doing for USAID on the South Asia Free Trade Area. I had known Mr Singh for several years but it was the first time I was meeting him as prime minister. He told me that in one of his conversations with President Pervez Musharraf he said that neither had worked hard to gain the offices they then occupied. “We are both accidental leaders but since we are now here we should use our positions to bury the past and work for improving the economic and social welfare of our people,” he told President Musharraf. By moving in that direction at Sharm El Sheikh, Manmohan Singh may have taken a small step in that direction.