SOUTH ASIA: Rocky Path of Democracy

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

NEW DELHI, Nov 13 1995 (IPS) - True or false: dictatorships are more prone to war, and democracies get along better with each other.

Probably false, say some South Asian political scientists.

When Pakistan became democratic in 1988 after more than a decade of military dictatorship, political pundits predicted that India and Pakistan would become best friends. In the years since, tensions remain high between the two democracies.

Even the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) worked better when its six member countries in the region were predominantly ruled by juntas or absolute monarchs.

In fact, SAARC was the brainchild of the assassinated Bangladeshi general-turned-president, Zia-ur Rahman. The idea was eagerly taken up by Nepal’s King Birendra and Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuk and Gen Zia-ul Haq of Pakistan.

Besides regional giant India, SAARC is made up of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and tiny Bhutan and the Maldives. Today, all but the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan have some form of parliamentary democracy.

But having members which are democratic seems to have made it more difficult to push SAARC’s regionalisation agenda, South Asian diplomats and academics say. Despite a drive to create a South Asian Preferential Tariffs Area (SAPTA), SAARC has lost its fizz. Annual SAARC summits invariably get postponed, and this year’s confab in New Delhi is likely to meet a similar fate.

“The general theory is that democratisation will make neighbours more neighbourly. Well, we’re not so sure,” says Shridhar Khatri, political science professor at Nepal’s Tribhuvan University.

“In fact, the process of democratisation going on in South Asia is in a dangerous phase. Countries do not become democratic overnight, and they are statistically more prone to aggression and war during the transition.”

Under dictatorships South Asian countries like Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh were relatively stable because of the strict curtailment of political freedoms.

But pluralism and multi-party elections in these countries in the past five years have brought immense internal turmoil. In Pakistan, Karachi has become synonymous with anarchy, in Bangladesh political polarisation and agitational politics closes down the nation for several days in a month, and Nepal has seen three elections in four years.

Leaders of these countries are preoccupied with domestic issues and have neither the vision nor the time for democratic new regional initiatives. In fact, parties find it useful to take populist anti-neighbourly lines to do well in polls.

Even so, some academics like Nancy Jetley of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi believe it is unfair to blame democracy for the inability of nations to get along. “It is only a democratic, stable and cooperative South Asia which can cope with the region’s challenges,” she told a conference organised by the German Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung here last week.

Unfortunately, South Asian countries — even in mature democracies like India and Sri Lanka — are still trying to make democratic politics work.

Syed Anwar Husain of the Department of History at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh feels democracy within nations is not enough. “Internal democratisation has to have a regional translation whereby the SAARC framework for regionalism gets the necessary incentive for growing in strength.”

Jetley says South Asia should not get distracted by diplomacy and forge ahead with trade ties. “We have to move beyond strictly political parametres and create the basis of regional economic interaction,” she said.

While other regions of the world form their own trading and economic blocs, South Asian leaders are lagging behind. With 1.3 billion people, South Asia has one-fifth of the world’s population, with half of them living in absolute poverty.

Says Charan Wadhwa of the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research: “South Asia’s need for economic cooperation and raising living standards far outweigh the petty tensions that keep us preoccupied. And the balm of economic relations can help in containing tension.”

Progress in setting up a preferential trade area under SAPTA have been slow because of misgivings among smaller South Asian countries that India’s mighty economy will dominate. But Wadhwa disputes this, citing studies to show that the gross national

product of smaller nations would actually do much better.

The low impact of South Asia’s economic liberalisation on reducing poverty has disheartened many erstwhile supporters of democracy. It has become fashionable to be politically incorrect and doubt: maybe the East Asians were on to something when they sacrificed political freedom for economic growth.

An Indian member of Parliament and former diplomat Mani Shankar Aiyar has no patience with people who admire the Singapore model. “If the choice is to be poor and free or rich and in chains, I’ll take poor and free,” he says.

Aiyar says democracy shouldn’t be written off so easily just because the transition is messy. “Dictators can lead us easier from confrontation to war by ignoring the peoples’ desire for peace. The path of democracy maybe rocky, but it will get us there.”