Peace on sale
Asif Ali Zardari and Manmohan Singh stood together in New Delhi adding weight to peace efforts with the first visit by a Pakistani head of state to India in 7 years. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
Ihave searched the broad history of capitalism as best as I could, right up to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. I've looked up the evolution of global trade. Nowhere could I find a single clue to the mantra for peace between warring nations as flaunted by Messrs Asif Zardari and Manmohan Singh. Both want us to believe that their business elites are best equipped to normalise the dodgy relations between India and Pakistan. If anything, officially sponsored trade as opposed to the days of the good old Kabuliwallah has been a source of conflict everywhere. Look it in the eye. The worst-case scenario for a global conflict today exists between the world's two largest trading partners China and the United States. Pakistani businessmen pushing for increased business with India cite the growing Sino-India commerce as a model to replicate. In other words, we are being told to keep the powder dry, the Agnis and the Prithvis on the ready, while business goes on unperturbed. Can it happen, and to what avail? History is replete with errors of judgment of the kind Messrs Zardari and Singh seem susceptible to. Trade and commerce could be just about OK as a need to be addressed. But it can hardly be accepted as the only acceptable panacea for the politically fuelled woes that we confront. Ask the tormented people of Kashmir or the stranded soldier in Siachen what the priorities should be. If somebody suggests that India-Pakistan trade, spurred by exclusively anointed business visits, will boost the possibilities of peace in the subcontinent, that is pure state-sponsored blackmail, not a considered choice on offer to the people. It's like the fable about catching a bird: light a candle and put it on the bird's head so that the melting wax blinds it. Then you can catch the bird. How on earth are the various business federations or the chambers of commerce on either side going to pave the way for the armies to go back to their barracks? There never was any connection between low-trade volumes of any two countries and denial of visas to each other's citizens. And traders are about private profit and not public interest of the kind that people of the two countries should be looking at. My favourite Anglo-Indian teacher at La Martiniere College in Lucknow taught innocuous sounding ditties in our geography class: 'In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In fourteen hundred and ninety-eight, Da Gama knocked at India's gate.' But the nursery lyrics masked the trauma of entire civilisations across the oceans that were torn asunder by colonialism and its accompanying racist worldview. The East India Company was about trade, we know. Was it also about peace?Before Saudi Arabia prescribed the death penalty for carrying cannabis (which you can still smoke freely in Amsterdam), colonial Britain and its Indian compradors were pumping opium into China in the name of free trade. The Opium Wars, the Boston Tea Party in America were all aspects of trade for profit with official imprimatur. The people's resistance to thwart the nefarious business was fortunately just as robust. I hear India, a net importer of oil, will sell petroleum products to Pakistan. The last time there was an oil shock India had to surrender a portion of its gold reserves to stave off defaulting on international loans. The move thrust Dr Manmohan Singh at the centre-stage of Indian politics and the IMF as the country's economic shepherd. Any African leader who resisted the IMF was taken down. There is a long list of casualties Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast and Muammar Qadhafi of Libya. The history of the World Bank would be incomplete without reference to the central role in it of the retired warmongers who headed it. Lahore and Karachi at present are not very different from New Delhi or Kolkata in electricity shortages. There was a time when Pakistan was offering to sell electricity to India. Now it's the other way round. Two energy-deficit countries trying to bail each other out makes for a welcome relief from their standard carping. But why should that hold up the withdrawal of troops from Kashmir and Siachen, and the easing of visas for the ordinary or underprivileged citizen in either country? We are told that the climate of hate is abating between the two countries. This smacks of ridiculous pomposity. The only people I know that badmouth the other side are their sleuths, officials or diplomats and the occasional visiting journalist. To say that hate is waning only goes to show it is something that can be managed and controlled with the throw of a switch. It also means that it can be unleashed at will. We have very pliable TV outfits that can start or stop vicious campaigns, full of jingoism, projecting their countries as bigger in influence than the baby pool the world actually assigned to them. It is these journalists and assorted officials, more than anyone else, who are today assiduously promoting powerful business clubs usually known for their single-minded pursuit of private profit as beacons of hope for peace. Two issues need to be resolved or at least understood in their context by the common people in India and Pakistan. The business community anywhere is not known for its sensitivity towards matters of peace. It can and often does make more profit out of war and prevailing tensions between states. I am not revealing a secret in asserting that businessmen by the very nature of their pursuit are prone to shore up right-wing politics. Traders loyal to the revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami can, of course, forever go on kindling a fear psychosis about opening trade and investment across the borders. They are notorious for missing the point. However, trade was one of the eight or nine issues between India and Pakistan in their composite dialogue. And it would be self-defeating to saddle it with the responsibility of heralding peace. That was never its strength, and it can't be today.
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