AFTER President Pervez Musharraf’s speech on the Kashmir Solidarity Day, Pakistan’s stand on Kashmir has stiffened. Now that the fundamental contours of the government’s Kashmir policy have been firmly established, it is clear that Pakistan’s old, maximalist position on the issue now stands energized and revived.

According to this stand, Kashmir is not a territorial dispute, but it involves the fundamental political right of the Kashmiris, as enshrined in the Security Council Resolutions to either join India or Pakistan through a UN-administered plebiscite.

This stand also rejects the Indian claim of Kashmir being an integral part of the Indian Union. It does not see Kashmir as a bilateral issue and asserts that it can only be solved through international mediation. President Musharraf has added more weight to this traditional position by calling on India to improve its appalling human rights record in occupied Kashmir and show its sincerity in finding a solution to the problem by means other than state terror and repression.

This means that the appalling human rights situation in occupied Kashmir is not a peripheral concern for Pakistan. President Musharraf’s pronouncement, therefore, was not emotive expression tailored to the requirements of the occasion. It was a policy pronouncement on the issue.

Not surprisingly, the speech has halted the rumour mills feeding speculation that perhaps a back-door, behind-the-scenes arrangement for the division of Kashmir is on the cards. Pakistan, it has been made clear, is not keen on a solution to the Kashmir problem involving key compromises. What was the reason for Gen Musharraf to reintroduce all the elements of Pakistan’s original position on Kashmir after having shown flexibility and adaptability on this score?

The reasons are as much personal as these are strategic. General Musharraf has been remarkably astute in responding to the complex challenges of the new geo-strategic environment in the region. Unlike Afghanistan, where the template of policy change was designed by President George W. Bush’s “either you are with us or against us” statement, on Kashmir, President Musharraf has trodden a difficult stretch, making sensible adjustments in Pakistan’s Kashmir policy and not giving in, at the same time, to the Indian pressure tactics. He has stood firm against the Indian demand of handing over “wanted terrorists”, particularly Pakistanis, and has on the Line of Control. At the same time, by putting curbs on the activities of groups that have been operating in Indian occupied Kashmir using Pakistani soil or resources, and by warning others not to peddle their petty agendas on the issue, Gen Musharraf has shown courage and firmness that no leader before him has.

Moreover, he has taken considerable personal risk by taking on militant outfits with huge financial and organizational support base. The mere fact that his personal security has been enhanced and reinforced is indicative of the kind of personal risks he has taken in moving against the forces of militancy and fanaticism in the country.

There has also been much debate in the close circles of the army as to how much of the change in Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is good for the Kashmiri struggle, and whether India would not exploit to its diplomatic advantage and to the detriment of the resistance struggle in the occupied valley. Another, and a more important point of the debate is what Pakistan gets out of showing flexibility and making gestures of peace and conciliation to India. Being the leader of the armed forces, Gen. Musharraf has been engaged in a process of talks and exchanges to reassure his commanders of the utility of handshakes with Atal Behari Vajpayee and the necessity of tough decisions on militant Kashmiri groups.

However, for all the difficult decisions that Gen Musharraf has taken done in fashioning a new Pakistan position on Kashmir, there has not been any substantive change in the Indian stance on the issue. From its ruthless operations in the valley to its military build-up on Pakistan’s border, New Delhi has done everything to make things worse between India and Pakistan.

The most damaging of all has been a spate of arrogant and spiteful statements from India, reflecting how Pakistan’s current stand on Kashmir is being viewed by Delhi.

Deliberately or out of politically expedient motive, India has been giving the domestic crowd an impression that the conciliatory steps taken by Pakistan were obtained under the threat of war. In fact, India opened a full psy-war against Pakistan which is supposed to have cornered Islamabad on Kashmir.

This is, however, no reason for President Musharraf not to stick to the path of flexibility that he has adopted even in the face of Indian obduracy, believing that this is in the long-term interest of Pakistan and is helpful to the cause of peace and normalization in the subcontinent.

It is disappointing, however, that Washington’s encomium for President Musharraf’s bold speech of January 12 has not been matched by a nudge to India to make some move in the same direction and make it possible for Gen Musharraf to build on the new structure of Kashmir policy.

There has been no censure of Delhi for its military build-up and its persistent war-like posture reinforced by nuclear-capable missile tests and other provocative military moves. A nagging feeling is growing in Pakistan that in major world capitals there is no real appreciation of the causes and effects of tensions in the subcontinent and that while India’s bellicosity is treated with benign indifference and its hostile acts go uncensured, Pakistan gets the rough end of the stick all the time.

Gen Musharraf’s January 12 speech reflected its disappointment, besides a serious concern over the continuing stalemate that could have been broken by some reciprocity from Delhi or a little sensitivity from the big powers to the grim consequences of war-like situation in the subcontinent. A crucial question also is how Pakistan’s stand on Kashmir would evolve beyond what President Musharraf has already stated? There is no easy answer to it.

The point is that Pakistan has gone as far as it could on Kashmir, and even this far it has walked alone. Now only a matching response from India, a genuine change in its conduct and policy can take the process forward. Either that or a concerted attempt by the international community to break the stalemate in a fashion that is manifestly fair and just alone can break the long stalemate. The world’s role has to be more than simple cheerleader for peace.

THE meeting of the World Economic Forum in New York in early February bore the marks of a world preoccupied with terrorism rather than social justice. This preoccupation originates from the overwhelming importance attached by the US to its war against terrorism after the trauma of September 11.

The public demonstrations that mark such economic moots duly materialized, drawing attention to the failure of the capitalist economic system to address the issues of equity and of growing poverty. However, the prevailing concerns were about addressing the global downturn and dealing with the roots of terrorism.

The G-7 meeting in Ottawa on February 8-9 also proved to be a tame affair, with stress again on overcoming the global recession, though the discussion of the economic crisis in Argentina did serve to highlight the problems of debt-plagued developing countries.

Next month, the UN Conference on Financing and Development, scheduled to be held from March 18 to 22 at Monterrey, Mexico, will provide another forum for taking up the basic problems of growing inequalities and poverty. However, the prevailing attitudes of the rich countries raise serious doubts whether the UN goal of halving world poverty by 2015, adopted at the millennium summit in 2000, would be achieved.

A major stumbling block to a concerted onslaught on poverty is the unilateralist approach of the US, the sole superpower. Though the terrorist outrage of September 11 led Washington to promote a global coalition against terrorism that is still in existence, the US is resuming its unilateralist ways that have already produced significant divergences with the European Union. The US remains opposed to a multilateral approach to addressing economic issues, preferring that they be managed through market forces. The EU, that includes a number of former colonial powers, notably Britain and France, having their own programmes of aid and investment, is seriously concerned about the trends that it finds deeply troubling.

The current situation is that the top 10% of its population controls 80% of the world’s resources. According to the ILO, the current trends indicate that by the year 2050, 5% of the population will control 80% of the resources. Capitalist globalization is expected to produce greater disparities, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Already, many western economists and NGOs are beginning to worry that the advantage conferred in ideological terms on the capitalist countries through the collapse of the Soviet Union are leading to dangerous complacency. Henry Northover of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development expressed the view that issues of global distribution and the interests of the poor are off the menu for the rich countries. The world’s richest 50 million earn as much as the poorest three billion. The risk of another counter movement growing against capitalism needs to be taken seriously.

Mr. Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the UN, gave a clear message on the concluding day of the World Economic Forum in New York on February 4 that equity issues should not be ignored. He called upon the rich countries for a timely and important intervention into the state of economic affairs of a fast-changing world. The combined impact of globalization and liberalization in the last decade of the twentieth century was to confine free enterprise to motives of profit seeking, maximizing revenues and expanding markets. Clearly, the dimensions of equity and social justice had been sidelined.

The UN, it may be recalled, has remained steadfast in calling for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their GDP to overseas development assistance. In practice, however, the volume of foreign aid has shrunk to below 0.25% for most rich countries, and the current level of aid is around $50 billion. Policies of liberal lending encouraged by the IMF and World Bank in the 1970s resulted in a rapid accumulation of debts by the developing countries that reached a total of $2,083 billion by the end of 1999. This was equal to 163% of their estimated receipts from exports. The sum represented 38% of their GDP and debt servicing accounted for 28% of their national income. During the year 2000, the developing countries received a total of $292 billion in loans, but had to pay back $269 billion for debt servicing, leaving a net inflow of only $23 billion.

The external debt of the developing countries which stood at $75 billion in 1970 grew to $639 billion in 1980, to $ 1341 in 1990 and to an estimated $2,038 billion by 2000. An interesting statistic is that they paid back $1,280 billion in debt servicing during the decade of the 1980s, but still their debt more than doubled by 1990. No wonder the poor countries have found it impossible, with some exceptions, to maintain a sustainable level of growth.

Africa is the continent where problems of poverty are emerging in their most acute form. Most countries are afflicted with a high debt burden, high incidence of AIDS, and endemic poverty. The British government, which has a special interest in Africa, nearly half of whose population lives in former colonies that are now members of the commonwealth, feels specially worried about the intractable problems of poverty and backwardness in the continent. As British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw put it, “you cannot have four continents going forward, with one going backwards”.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair toured Africa recently, and committed his country to continuing involvement in helping the continent overcome poverty. France has also special plans in operation in the francophone countries, and EU has a relationship of interdependence with a group of developing countries in Africa and the Caribbean.

South Asia contains perhaps the highest percentage of the poor in the world. The number of person earning less than $1 a day stands at 521.8 million, and those earning less than $2 per day at 1,094.6 million. Around 40% of the population of India and Pakistan lives below the poverty line. As these countries are also following the broad liberalization policies encouraged by the World Bank and the IMF, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. The debt burden has also been growing. Pakistan’s debt grew from $17.295 billion in 1991 to $39.5 billion in 2001. Its annual debt-servicing liability accounts for almost 60% of its budget and was the main cause of a fiscal deficit of $3.2 billion in 2001-02.

With the debt burden hobbling growth, and the benefits of globalization going mainly to the rich countries, major initiatives are needed to halt the continuing slide towards poverty in the developing countries. The gulf between the rich and the poor countries has been widening, and the prevailing economic system is likely to keep the outlook grim for the poor of the world. The major responsibility for remedying this situation lies on the shoulders of the US, which has the world’s largest economy and which also has a dominating voice in multilateral institutions.

Both the process of globalization and the operation of the free market have to be modified significantly if any progress is to be achieved in alleviating world poverty. Some belt-tightening and self-discipline is also required on the part of the developing countries themselves. Even heavily indebted countries keep spending disproportionately on armaments, though this adds to their problems of poverty. The most effective debt relief would, however come from a write-off of debts by the rich countries or at least a freeze on them by making them interest-free. The benefits of globalization will then spread more evenly if the WTO’s insistence on a tariff free world economy is accompanied by a visa-free world in which labour from the poor developing countries has as much freedom of access as the goods from the developed countries, so that a truly global economy can emerge.

The current priorities of the world’s major powers do not show adequate recognition of the efforts needed for poverty alleviation. Both governments and business corporations have to take initiatives to improve the operation of the free-market system. Governments need to redefine institutions that enable the narrowing of inequalities. There will have to be efficient and credible institutions for social security. Industry, on its part, would have to cater to imperatives of social justice. The dark vistas of continuing injustice and increasing inequalities would persist, and generate unrest that may ultimately take the form even of terrorism, unless the G-7 and the multinational corporations take timely and resolute action.