Anil Datta reports on a talk by Mani Shanker Aiyer at the posthumous launch of a noted journalist’s book in Karachi

Fegardless of the mutual (expediency-driven) antagonism India and Pakistan harbour against each other, there are occasions when we have to give our “enemies” credit for their achievements. As the old adage goes, “Give the devil his due”. We cannot deny India’s achievements in the economic sphere, the 200,000 people who have emerged from the poverty trap and into the lower middle classes. The British brought the industrial revolution and manufacturing to India, and today, India is the second largest overseas investor in the UK.

Symbols of British blue blood like Jaguar cars and British Steel are now Indian property. This progress has come about due to an almost unhindered decades-long democratic process.

But not all that glitters is gold, as former Indian diplomat, petroleum minister, and now a member of the Rajya Sabha, Mani Shanker Aiyer, reminded the audience at the posthumous launch of the late noted journalist M.B. Naqvi’s book in Karachi on Jan 8, 2011. “India will qualify to be called an economic superpower,” he said, “only when the man on the street can get three square meals a day”.

Mr Aiyer’s analysis is based on the fact that despite her forays into the international economic scenario, India is still a country where starvation deaths take place. There is an atrocious class divide; the metropolitan centres have dual faces, with glitzy areas meant for foreigners and the local elite, and abject poverty and squalor for the masses. Grinding poverty is still a hallmark of the Indian landscape.

But the ongoing democratic process means that those who make no effort to change this can and will be booted out, like Chandra Baboo Naidu, former Chief Minister of Hyderabad who boasted of his achievements in making the state a symbol of economic progress – a process that benefitted two-to-three percent of the financial elite while the masses writhed in poverty.

As Mr Aiyer pointed out, the Western media’s glorification of India’s economic achievements has much to do with the history of India’s staunchly socialist economy. After Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao decided to hand the Indian economy over to the IMF and the World Bank following changes in the global ideological complexion, a capitalist India became a decades-old dream come true for the West. When the West glorifies this change, it is very much an attempt to glorify capitalism and tout the success of the capitalistic system over socialism.

Mr Aiyer urged Pakistan to give up its excessive subservience to the US, and stressed that a strong democratic Pakistan would help build an even stronger democratic India. The recognition that a strong democratic Pakistan is imperative to India’s progress indicates that the destinies of both countries are intertwined. Had this realisation dawned six decades earlier, this region would not have become the hotbed of superpower rivalry that has only led to the suffering of people of both countries.

India and Pakistan can jointly stave off all threats, internal and externals, stressed Mr Aiyer. As he pointed out, after the world began to assume a unipolar hue in the 1990s, taking advantage of the power rivalry in South Asia, the US began to make inroads into the area.

Were India and Pakistan to have economic cooperation, with complementary economies our trade ties which, even if they went against the interests of the capitalist cartels and feudal syndicates, would have benefit the common man presently crushed under the yoke of hyper-inflation.

Pakistan gets inferior quality raw iron ore from Australia at four times the C&F price that we’d incur if we were to import the same commodity from India. Similarly the Indians would gain immensely by importing textiles from Pakistan and its highly developed industry, rather than from the US or the EU. All this and much more is encapsulated in Mr Aiyer’s talked titled, “We share M B Naqvi’s dream”. It is high time that the governments on both sides worked towards making that dream a reality.

The writer is a staff reporter