POLITICS: Indo-Pakistan Rivalry Mars Asian Social Forum

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

HYDERABAD, India, Jan 3 2003 (IPS) - Subcontinental rivalries have spilled into the ongoing Asian Social Forum (ASF) in this southern Indian city, where key peace and human rights activists from Pakistan were denied visas to attend the meeting that has drawn some 10,000 people.

Subcontinental rivalries have spilled into the ongoing Asian Social Forum (ASF) in this southern Indian city, where key peace and human rights activists from Pakistan were denied visas to attend the meeting that has drawn some 10,000 people.

Amit Sengupta, organising committee member of the ASF, billed as an Asian prelude to the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, Brazil later this month, told IPS that he was told by top officials that they had ”orders from the top” to ensure that well-known Pakistani peace activists did not attend the Jan. 2-7 meeting.

”This is terribly disappointing in view of the fact that the ASF would have provided just the opportunity for people-to-people contacts and movement-to-movement contacts at a time when sabre-rattling between the two nuclear-armed neighbours have started up once again,” Sengupta pointed out.

Sengupta is a leader of the Delhi Science Forum (DSF), a voluntary organisation of scientists and social scientists who vigorously opposed India’s weaponisation of its nuclear potential in 1998, which triggered off a dangerous phase of nuclear and missile rivalry with Pakistan.

Asma Jehangir, a well-known women’s rights lawyer and human rights activist, along with anti-nuclear scientists Pervez Hoodbhoy and A D Nayyar, head the list of prominent people who have been denied visas in spite of several weeks of lobbying in New Delhi by the organising committee. Sengupta said the Indian government’s determination to ensure that Pakistani activists did not get to Hyderabad was apparent in the case of I A Rehman, director of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission and member of the Pakistan Peace Coalition.

He was granted a visa but had his movements ”perversely” restricted to the cities of New Delhi and the western port city of Mumbai.

Nayyar, a nuclear physicist and researcher at Pakistan’s Sustainable Development Institute, has been in the news for lending credence to reports that Pakistan may have entered into a nuclear technology-for-missiles deal with North Korea and that both technologies originated in China.

The denial of visas to members of the Pakistani delegation was first made known Thursday at the opening plenary by Nirmala Deshpande, well-known follower of Mahatma Gandhi, who peacefully led India to independence from Britain in 1947 and opposed the separation of Islamic Pakistan. Deshpande’s announcement was greeted with cries of ”shame, shame” form a large section of the delegates, who came from many Asian countries and other parts of the world.

Participants who flocked to the ASF included representatives of marginalised communities, internally displaced people, workers, trade union leaders, health professionals, economists and peace activists fighting the ills brought on by globalisation.

”’ASF draws inspiration from the WSF, the annual event at Porto Alegre in Brazil that has challenged the Bretton Woods institutions,” said Probir Purkayastha, an organising committee member.

According to Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy from the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the ASF has special relevance because Asia has become the key focus of ”neo-imperialism” that is linked to economic globalisation especially after the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks.

Many here expressed concern that an expected attack on Iraq would prove catastrophic not just for Iraqis but for the rest of Asia as well as the whole world. ”We have to stand with the people of Iraq and Palestine in the struggle against imperialism,” economist Prabhat Patnaik told delegates.

”We have to end U.S. imperialism and the Israeli occupation,” said Abdel Jawad Saleh, former minister in the Palestinian Authority and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, whose speech at the plenary was drowned out by wild cheering and clapping.

”Our sons and daughters and all those who disappeared in the struggle against oppression in Argentina and elsewhere are present here in all of you ,” said Nora de Cortina, one of the founders of the Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the May Plaza), a group of widows and mothers seeking justice for relatives who disappeared during the country’s dictatorship.

Economic issues were not far behind. ”The crying need of the hour is unity of all forces committed to a just world order – that is the essence of the fight against globalisation,” said Medha Patkar, who leads India’s National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM).

”Communal harmony and peace are upset by religious fundamentalism, be it the pogrom witnessed in the western state of Gujarat or the Gaza Strip in the Middle East,” she added.

Walden Bello, director of the Thailand-based think tank Focus on Global South, said that the world was at a historical crossroads as the United States is poised to attack Iraq and corporate globalisation increases poverty around the world.

”But every crisis also carries with it an opportunity. U.S. imperialism has led to over-extension and counter-reaction in the Middle East, South Asia, South Korea, Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador,” he pointed out.

Against this backdrop, Bello suggested three roles for the ASF: provide movements with a space for solidarity, plan against militarism and corporate globalisation that is supported by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation and finally, allow activists to imagine that ‘another world is possible’, the slogan of the World Social Forum.