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The decision made by Myanmar to withdraw from the chairmanship of ASEAN in the year 2006 must have come as a relief to all the other members of the regional organisation. The pressure that has lately been exercised on the body to have Myanmar pushed aside from the rotational position in view of its bad record of internal politics had reached a point where ASEAN faced a real possibility of embarrassing itself. It now seems that the pressure from the United States and the European Union has worked. Despite that, however, it remains quite a mystery as to why ASEAN itself did not take such problems into consideration when it first allowed Yangon to enter its councils as a full member. One explanation that has generally been offered is that ASEAN nations believed that an invitation to join the organisation would in time lead the military junta ruling Myanmar into softening its hardline political stance at home and even open the door to democracy. Judging by the way things have turned out, the calculation was misplaced, for the military rulers have as yet demonstrated little willingness to bring their country into the arena of civilised, democratic order.
   Having said that, one cannot but agree that the readiness with which the Myanmar military caved in to the pressure about the 2006 chairmanship of ASEAN is remarkable in a way. But there is also a message that comes out of the decision, which is that politics in the country is yet in a state of strangulation and therefore is in huge need of outside support to come out of the bind. It will be a mistake to think that the regime will now happily go into the business of building democracy as a way of proving to the outside world that it is ready to do business with it. For all one knows, the junta might now feel free of any constraints, now that the ASEAN problem is no more upon it, and go full-scale into suppressing the democracy movement further. General Than Shwe, the man leading the regime, reportedly puts an end to any discussion as soon as Aung San Suu Kyi’s name crops up. That being the attitude, and not just of Than Shwe, it ought not to be expected that the junta will be keen about walking away from power any time soon. One must not forget that the military has kept Myanmar suppressed since 1962, when General Ne Win seized power from the civilian government of U Nu. In the last week, the regime has made sure that one of its relatively moderate voices, General Khin Nyunt, is put away for good. Nyunt, once a powerful member of the regime and its internationally known face, was removed from all his positions last year and swiftly put in prison. A secret trial has now resulted in his being sentenced to a total of forty four years’ imprisonment in eight cases. His sons have also been imprisoned along with him.
   Now that it has been demonstrated that the Myanmar regime can capitulate under pressure, it remains for the outside world – and that means Washington, the EU and ASEAN – to step up efforts towards compelling the military into initiating a dialogue with the National League for Democracy led by Aung San Suu Kyi. There are few options before the regime. It can either negotiate with Suu Kyi and thereby help the country emerge into sunlight; or it can hang on to power and push the country further towards the abyss. For the world, though, a Myanmar under the military will be a boil on an otherwise healthy body of modernity.

Passion for politics

Chief Election Commissioner M.A. Aziz has just had his initial experience of dealing with politicians. Never mind that the men and women he met at his office on Tuesday were all people who think they are politicians because they think they happen to be the leaders of political parties. If you ask any of them why they should matter in national politics, you might get a look that would be a discreet assault on your knowledge or motives. Think, for instance, of the gentleman who told the CEC that he had contested all the elections which have so far taken place in free Bangladesh. Now, that is quite a feat, one that could in time place that perennial candidate on to the Guinness Book of Records.
   The meeting on Tuesday was, if you really wish to know, proof of the old adage that politics remains one of the two passions (the other being poetry) of Bengalis. The ideas which swept the entire hall where the meeting was being held were in many cases a matter of wonder. Someone floated the proposition that a caretaker system of government would not be necessary if a government based on fealty to Allah were in place. How does one respond to that kind of original thinking? Another participant, in a state of visible irritation, wanted to know if he had been called to discuss such a minor issue as the voters’ list. What did he expect? But, of course, one does understand the man’s exasperation. He has been doing politics for ages and so he expects people, even at the Election Commission, to take him seriously. Among these politicians was a woman, her glasses positioned on her wonderfully coiffed hair, seriously explaining her point of view to the EC officials. Briefly, what transpired at the Election Commission on Tuesday was a demonstrable degree of political enthusiasm. For all his problems concerning livelihood and the like, the Bengali is yet an individual who takes intense interest in politics. Let that be seen as something of an encouragement. It proves once more the idea that ours is a vibrant nation because of the willingness of so many of us to debate political issues all day long.
   And that is how life takes meaning for us. How many societies can you spot where politics is regularly the staple of deliberation?

The rest of the developing world stood and watched as the leaders of the industrialised G8 nations wrote off debts of 18 of Africa’s poorest nations and increased the continent’s total pot of aid by $50 billion.
   That Africa needs help is difficult to deny. Unfair trade rules propped up in favour of European and US agricultural produce do indeed keep much of Africa in the throes of ever-deepening poverty. The US and EU together spend roughly $300 billion in subsidies given to their farming sector every year — more dollars spent per cow annually than the per capita income of the average African. The social and political fallout of this hopeless economic depredation is also apparent all over Africa. As a corruption pandemic continues to deny the African on the street his share of the continent’s immense wealth of diamonds and oil, ostensibly democratic governments such as Sudan’s Ahmad al-Bashir’s and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe’s are running a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing in their efforts to cling to power. And they are in the international spotlight because their countries are rich in oil and diamonds. The list of oppressive governments in Africa runs much, much longer.
   The question that needs answering is: are these problems endemic to Africa or are they the advanced stage of a malady that already has much of the world in its grips?
   It is a damning indictment of the Washington Consensus that Africa’s woes are invisibly shared by a majority of the world’s peoples. This claim is illustrated by the simple and alarming fact that disparity in per capita income between the 20 richest and 20 poorest nations in the world has more than doubled between 1960 and 1995, even as the global economy grew sevenfold since 1950.
   What does this mean?
   Simply put: poverty is tightening its grip on a far greater portion of the world, than one might suspect. Between 1987 and 1998, the numbers of people living on less than $1 a day grew in every geo-political region in the world save East Asia and the Pacific, and Middle East and North Africa to a more negligible extent. If the poverty line is redrawn at $2 a day, an estimated 2.7 billion people are this year estimated to be living on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. That would be more than half the population of the developing world.
   And if this characterises the body-politic of the world’s social disparities, then each individual country in those regions can be likened to a stem-cell which mimics the structure of that greater whole. Even in Britain – one of the richest countries in the world, studies show that the richest 10 per cent of the population have seen their incomes increase at more than twice the rate of the poorest 10 per cent.
   The Democratic Republic of Congo’s GDP grew 6 per cent in 2003, India’s grew 14.89 per cent, Nepal’s 3 per cent and Bangladesh’s 5.26 per cent. What percentage of these GDP growths were distributed among the poorest 10 per cent of those countries? While figures are difficult to come by, it is common knowledge that those countries belong to regions where near about a 100 million more people have been plunged into poverty since the 1980s.
   The fallout of these processes has long been in the making. In Bangladesh, as poverty tightens its grip and public-sector spending on education, health-care, and agriculture faces cuts in real terms spurred on by the IMF and the World Bank, the chasm of income disparity is widening. In 2004, 1.5 per cent of Bangladesh’s national income went to the poorest 10 per cent of the population. That proportion is down from 1.7 per cent in 1999. Compare this to the 36.5 per cent of the national income that went to the richest 10 per cent in 2004. The Centre for Policy Dialogue interprets this gap as having increased from a multiple of 20.0 times in 1999 to 24.5 times in 2004. It points out that in 1995-96 this multiple was 15.5 times.
   Bangladesh’s eighteen major bomb attacks have left at least 148 dead since March 1999. The responsibility for most of these attacks are being attributed by certain observers to the emergence of Islamist terror networks in the country. As the quality of public sector education drops — corroding its value in terms of employment prospects, the state’s role as a major player in the development arena is also decreasing, replaced by NGOs. This means people are being driven to look for an alternative. The alternative that is emerging is the Saudi petro-dollar funded madrassah or Islamic school, whose curricula is in government control as a mere formality, and is characterised by communal values and the lack of real skills.
   Press reports say that until 2002, Islamist NGOs in Bangladesh have spent an estimated $25 million annually on religious education. Compare this to the grand total of roughly $72 million in state expenditure on the entire education sector in 1999. These charity-dollars are clearly forcing already fragile ethnic and religious fault-lines dividing the nation. And as the madrassah-educated masses grow in size, suddenly Wahhabi Islam — the Saudi kind — becomes God’s true word, and all other sects — Ahmadiyas and Shias among them — are declared apostates. In Bangladesh, the government responded to demands by the religious right by banning the publication of the Ahmadiya’s spiritual texts last year, followed by whatever attempts have been made to arrest the perpetrators. In Pakistan too, the Islamists are slowly gaining political ground, having emerged as the third-biggest political coalition in the country’s 2002 elections. The next elections not held by a military dictator (who happens to be a US lackey) might very well see them in power.
   Meanwhile, in the country’s northern and southern regions, institutions such as the rule of law and state authority are facing serious challenges by and large ignored by much of the Dhaka-centric politics and press. Under the guise of Maoism and Islamism, organised crime networks are slowly gaining ground in a violent response to the current status quo that drives large numbers of people into further deprivation. ‘Maoism has thus become the political recourse of the disengaged, angry rural poor of Bangladesh. It is not part of any “national liberation struggle”,’ writes journalist Afsan Chowdhury in this month’s issue of Himal Southasia. The rise of the Bangla Bhai phenomenon in the north and the forces given the blanket moniker of Sarbahara in the regions of Khulna are not only the result of the failures of state machinery but irrefutably linked to economic struggles.
   In Nepal — which is reeling from its own fast-growing Maoist insurgency — the crisis is precipitating into a full blown civil war. About 12,000 people are estimated to have died since the insurgency began in 1996. The Maoists has effectively hijacked the state machinery across great swathes of western Nepal. In fact ‘hijacked’ is a euphemism. Nepal’s Maoist movement has subverted the state machinery in the 40 per cent of Nepal’s territory that it is said to control. It has set up its own schools and curricula, established its own civil courts and even redistributed the feudal land-holdings in the areas under its control. And this, experts say, has been a direct response to the fact that Nepal’s economic development in the last two decades has done little to improve the lot of the average Nepali who lives outside the reaches of the Shangri-la that is Kathmandu. According to journalist Li Onesto — author of the Nepal’s People’s War — the Maoists have risen out of the ashes of deepening poverty and economic disparity, an oppressive caste system and a Kathmandu-centric government that has readily accepted Indian economic hegemony through exploitative water-sharing and economic treaties.
   In India’s poorest state Bihar, the first formations of a Maoist insurgency are also in the making. On June 23 this year at least 20 people were killed when Maoists attacked a police outpost in the East Champaran region of Bihar. These Maoists are said to have close links with their Nepali counterparts and are said to operate in a number of Indian states. The insurgencies in Assam, Tripura and now Bihar doubtlessly harness the grievances of the countless millions who have never seen a computer, let alone, been part of India’s world-renowned silicon revolution. The shiny, happy people on Indian MTV might very well be from another planet as far as people in Bihar are concerned. The state has the highest population growth rate of any Indian state and economic growth is languishing at 2.9 per cent compared to a national average of 6.1 per cent.
   Superficially, the war each of these dissident groups are fighting is the one against a status quo which is driving the impoverished masses into further destitution. Unfortunately that status quo also includes superstructures such as democracy, elections, human rights and liberties, and secular values. As and when each of these movements culminates in putsch, civil society will not be able to influence the terms of engagement and the values that these new governments will espouse. In Nepal, the Maoists already enforcing a policy of forced conscriptions, seizing one-member from every family in areas they control, to fight for the cause. They also have a policy of ‘exterminating class-enemies and snitches,’ doubtlessly interpreting the meaning of those vague terms to obliterate political opponents. In Pakistan, the common people see Sharia law and a Caliphate-style government as the only available alternative to a failed conventional politics, riddled with corruption for well over two decades now. Have we not learned any lessons from Shah Pahlavi’s Iran? Ethnic massacres, economic isolationism, political repression, and religious persecution will inevitably follow.
   Suddenly does everything we are currently witnessing in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Algeria ring a bell? It is not altruism but self-interest that should drive the G8 leaders into upscaling their efforts to end unfair trade rules and economic deprivation across the board, not just for Africa. Otherwise they will find themselves increasingly negotiating with inward-looking governments that do not espouse democratic values and feel no compulsion to uphold international treaties. Africa’s political and social woes illustrate the future perils of inaction.