SOUTH ASIA: People’s Groups Press Their Gov’ts on Peace

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Rajashri Dasgupta

KOLKATA, India, May 11 2003 (IPS) - If governments in South Asia are pressing for stricter controls and harder international borders, its peoples are striving to revive the collective existence of communities and their close cultural affinities to promote peace in the subregion.

On May 14, a busload of 35 women from India will drive down to Dhaka, the capital of neighbouring Bangladesh, on a peace mission. For a week, Bangladeshi women and peace activists will host the Indian delegates of the ‘Peace Bus’, consisting of writers, journalists, social activists, singers and teachers.

"We will organise cultural meets, art exhibitions, theatres shows for our Indian guests. After a few months we will take a Peace Bus over to India," said Shireen Huq of Nari Pokho, a women’s rights group in Dhaka. The Indians will stay with families to get a taste of Bangladeshi hospitality.

In Kolkata, a metropolis in eastern India from where the Peace Bus will be flagged off, women are excited, readying for the event. Peace songs are being composed, friendship slogans thrashed out, colourful banners painted and leaflets written for the delegates to distribute among people along the 18-hour drive to Dhaka.

Said Kamla Bhasin of Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia (WIPSA), one of the main organisers of this peace campaign: "A woman is not a wall that divides, a woman is a crack in that wall."

Similarly, there is great expectation and excitement in India’s western front.

After all,the need to revive links and strengthen friendship in South Asia has already led to the visit by a 13-member Pakistani parliamentary delegation to India on May 8. The two nuclear neighbours had no contacts for the last 17 months, diplomatic relations – and even air and train travel had been withdrawn.

"This results in immense economic hardship and heartbreaks as the people of the region are closely linked socially and culturally. Many Indians, for instance, have relatives living either in Pakistan or Bangladesh," said economist Sushil Khanna of Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy.

This forum is a citizen-to-citizen initiative that is one of the main initiators of the visit of the Pakistani delegation to India.

The politics of hatred dates back to 1947, when the British colonial rulers divided the Indian subcontinent along religious borders. Islamic Pakistan was created that year and East Pakistan fought for its independence in 1971 to form Bangladesh.

What followed were large-scale killings and migration of refugees across the borders, a memory that still touches a raw nerve and haunts the people in the region today.

India and Pakistan have had bitter relations over the Muslim-dominated, Indian-held Kashmir, where the wishes of the disputed area’s people are little heard.

While India accuses Pakistan of fostering ”cross-border terrorism”, Pakistan claims its support to militant groups in the insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir is for ‘independence’ of Kashmir.

In 1998, India joined the global nuclear club and Pakistan followed, leading to a further escalation of arms race and tension in the subcontinent. This fuelled concern over the use of nuclear weapons, given that India and Pakistan have fought three wars, the last in 1999.

India’s ties with Bangladesh in its eastern front have been ‘less tense’, though they have flared up occasionally mainly on the issue of undocumented immigrants.

In February, the two countries almost came to war and guns were lowered only at the intervention at the highest levels in both capitals.

The Indian government, led by the Hindu-based political party Bharatiya Janata Party, has accused Bangladesh of ignoring the migration of millions of poor Muslims through the 4,000-kilometre international border, without valid travel documents.

This migration has caused widespread demographic changes in the border areas in favour of Muslims, say the leaders of the Hindu right, with Indian peasants losing land and jobs to the new settlers.

"There need to be repeated efforts to have more visits and meeting of citizen groups to register the intense need for peace in South Asia," said Jashodhara Bagchi, chairwoman of the West Bengal Women’s Commission who is making the journey to Dhaka.

Bagchi, also the co-author of the book ‘The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India’, said: "The interaction of people across the subcontinent also embodies our demand to our respective heads of state that we need lasting peace on the subcontinent."

People have reasons to worry. In a report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, India’s defence budget for a 1.2 million-strong military had gone up by 21 percent in 2000 compared to the previous year’s budget.

In actual figures it is 586 billion rupees (12.4 billion U.S. dollars) and fulfills the political agenda of the ruling Hindu-based party that gives high priority to defence.

Thirty percent of the budget was to be spent for procuring weapons and on military research and development as India embarks on large-scale development and deployment of missile systems.

Its outlay for military hardware procurement has increased by 30 percent over the previous year’s 16 percent increase. The report stated that the successive increase in procurement spending is "considerable although not unexpected”.

What is obvious is that there are funds available – but not for development. The Human Development Report for South Asia 2002 reveals that more than 500 million South Asians live in absolute poverty, which is 40 percent of the world’s poor. Over 300 million are chronically malnourished.

The report also estimates that merely an outlay of one percent of the region’s Gross National Product on education would be adequate to send all the children to school in South Asia.

”This is peanuts if we take into account that it is less than is spent on cosmetics in the United States or on ice cream in Europe annually!” said Khanna. "The abominable social conditions persist not because of lack of resources but political will."