MONTERREY, we are being told by those who attended the recent United Nations Conference on Financing for Development as well as those who have analyzed its outcome, is a turning point in developed world’s relations with poor countries. Close to 50 heads of state or government went to Monterrey.

Unlike a number of other UN conferences held in recent years, there was a palpable sense of excitement in the weeks and days leading up to this meeting. Vicente Fox, the President of Mexico and the host of the conference, wrote an article published on the eve of the conference in which he spelled out his expectations. “This week in Monterrey we have the duty to take steps to ensure that future generations in the developing world can be spared the poverty and suffering that until now have been their inevitable destiny. We also have an opportunity to build a bridge between what we promise developing countries today and what we can accomplish tomorrow. It is not a matter of becoming our brothers’ keepers, but simply their partners,” he wrote in a newspaper article.

The Monterrey Consensus, the title given to the document signed by the world’s leaders at the concluding ceremony, is being billed as “an unprecedented accord between rich and poor on the best use of aid that will reverberate for years.” What happened at Monterrey to elicit such rapturous reviews of the conference’s outcome? In what way The Monterrey Consensus will guide the still evolving relations between the world’s rich and poor nations? What is Monterrey’s relevance for a country in Pakistan’s situation — one of the world’s poorest countries caught sitting on a piece of geography where a number of global fault lines meet? In what way the “selectivity” approach embedded in the document issued at Monterrey help Pakistan in accelerating its rate of growth and reducing the incidence of poverty? How should Islamabad respond to the opportunities created by Monterrey as well as the challenges posed by it?

To provide good answers to these questions we should step back a little and look at the forces and interests operating in many parts of the globe that brought so many leaders to Monterrey and produced The Monterrey Consensus. The growing indifference among many quarters of the developed world about the worsening situation in many regions of the developing world was checked by the terrorists’ attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. These attacks started a debate on an issue that was much discussed in the second half of the 20th century but was nowhere near a resolution when the terrorists struck. The substance of the debate revolved around the following question. What can and what should the world’s rich countries do to help those that are poor? This question acquired great significance for those who came to believe that poverty was one of the causes of global terrorism.

The link between poverty and terror was made unequivocally by President George W. Bush in his speech at Monterrey. “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror,” he told his audience. “We fight against poverty because opportunity is a fundamental right to human dignity.” But President Bush did not stop at that. He also invoked religion on behalf of the effort to address the problem of global poverty. “We fight against poverty because faith requires it and conscience demands it,” he said. In other words, the American president had discovered that the two wars — the war on poverty and the war on global terrorism — were intimately linked. To win one you had to win the other.

Similar sentiments were expressed by a number of other people attending the Monterrey Conference. “We will not create a safer world with bombs or brigades alone” said James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president. Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, called global poverty the “prominent moral and humanitarian challenge of our age.”

It was clear that the threat of terrorism from the world’s poor regions set the stage for the most significant effort to address world poverty since the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Those who met then had also reached the conclusion that economic under-development could put global security in danger. Following the blood letting that occurred in the war, there was no longer any appetite for further global conflict. The countries that had won the war were now prepared to create a global economic order that would help prevent another conflagration by promoting economic stability. One way of achieving that objective was to promote the rapid development of the world’s backward areas. Accordingly, industrialized nations were prepared to commit major resources to help the countries emerging out of decades — in some cases centuries — of colonial rule.

The Monterrey Conference led some world leaders to hope for a breakthrough similar to the one achieved at Bretton Woods. “The rich countries have now clearly accepted that there is no worldwide trickle down and you have to go out there and channel more resources to the poor countries. This is a very different attitude towards the development process,” said Jorge Castaneda, Mexico’s Foreign Minister, on the eve of the Monterrey gathering. Minister Castaneda also promised that the final conference statement “will not be a glossed-over disagreements or veiled recriminations, as so often has been the case in the past. Rather it will be a set of shared commitments.”

However, the countries represented at Monterrey did not travel the same route. The officials from the developing world went to the conference hoping to reverse the trend of the last several years which had resulted in the stagnation of official aid. The levels of aid had stagnated for two reasons. One, several donors had persuaded themselves that private capital flows — in particular foreign direct investment, or FDI — was a better way of putting more resources into the economies of the developing world than ODA. Two, the demise of European communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated one other reason why the United States and some of its allies had kept official development aid flowing to several sensitive areas in the world. Aid was no longer needed to buy political support in the developing world.

Much of the stagnation in ODA flows was the result of America’s growing indifference towards providing aid to the developing world. The US’s aid budget stagnated at about $10 billion since the end of the cold war. As a percentage of America’s gross domestic product, aid had fallen from nearly 3 per cent in 1946 — the peak of the Marshall Plan period — to 0.1 per cent today. In 2001, the proportion of American GDP committed to aid was the lowest among the countries represented in the Organization for Economic cooperation and Development, the OECD. Small countries of Europe — Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden — headed the list of aid providers.

In hoping that larger amounts of ODA would become available, the developing world had the support of some influential leaders from rich countries. Gordon Brown, the UK finance minister had called for the launch of another Marshall Plan.

In an article written for the American press in December 2001, Brown reminded Washington that “after World War II, American visionaries seized a powerful and unprecedented moment of opportunity. They created not only a new military and political settlement but a new economic and social order that tackled, in their words, ‘hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.’ And their plan, the Marshall Plan, transferred one per cent of national income every year, for four years, from America to poverty stricken countries — not as an act of charity but in recognition that, like peace, prosperity was indivisible and to be sustained it had to be shared.”

Now, fifty years on, Brown said that the world could see more clearly what happened to the poorest citizens in the poorest country could affect the richest citizen in the richest one. He was happy that “courageous American leadership was winning the war against terrorism, but how can we win the peace?” His answer: “A $50 billion-a-year investment fund that will help build the capacity of the poorest countries for sustainable development.” Such a fund would set the developing world on a “high road to a more just and inclusive economy.” This was also the amount of increase that Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, wished to see in the amount of official development assistance — or ODA — provided by the rich to the poor.

However, there were other participants at Monterrey who, by arguing differently, took a different route to the conference. The United States led the procession of countries that put more emphasis on policy reform than on the amount of ODA. The US delegation took the view that the problems of under-development and persistent poverty could not be addressed just by tapping the budgets of developed countries for more development aid.

The US treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill wanted the recipients of aid as well as the agencies providing assistance to measure the effectiveness of foreign support before spending more money. “How do we create a situation so that people become engines of economic progress and not just objects of our pity?” he asked. He maintained that the money of American taxpayers — “from our plumbers and carpenters” — is being squandered on aid with precious little to show for it.

There was plenty of evidence available to support the US point of view. According to one analysis, “to fight global poverty, the United States and its allies have founded dozens of aid agencies, built thousands of dams, roads and schools, and spent roughly $1 trillion since World War II. But nearly half of the people in the world still live on less than $2 a day, and a fifth survive on $1 or less. Most people in Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia were at the start of the 21st century poorer than at the cold war’s close. Despite the fast economic integration of the 1990s, Africans live no longer and have no higher incomes than they did 40 years ago.

What had gone wrong? Why had such a great deal of effort produced so little change in the lives of the people who live in the world’s poor countries? These questions had begun to worry development economists long before the world’s leaders came together at Monterrey. Several different answers were provided, some of them by economists working at the World Bank. I will take up these in the article next week.

DEAR READER, I am looking for Atal Behari Vajpayee, the person whom I have known — or at least I had thought so — for nearly 35 years. He was liberal, open and by no stretch of the imagination pro-Hindutva.

He and LK Advani represented two different streams of thought — Vajpayee shunning the hard line while Advani associating himself, overtly or covertly, with Hindu chauvinist forces. I felt unhappy whenever Vajpayee stood at attention at the RSS parades for the sanchalaks to prove that he was as obedient to them as any other in their ranks.

Still I believed that his approach towards the RSS was more realistic than real. Sometimes he would himself say that he was a swayamsevak. I too wondered whether he was only a mukut, as an RSS ideologue once said, behind which was an embodiment of saffronized thoughts. I rationalized that he did not believe in the RSS philosophy and went along because of his past association.

I did not like his leaving the Janata, a product of the struggle against the emergency, preferring links with the RSS to a party with pluralistic ethos. When he joined the BJP I was confident that he would carry his liberal thoughts wherever he went.

I recall when he visited London in 1990 — I was then India’s High Commissioner to the UK — Advani’s rath yatra to Ayodhya was in progress. I asked Vajpayee somewhat sarcastically why he had come here when the rath yatra was on in India. He said: “Those who are Ram bhakt (devotees), have gone to Ayodhya but those who are desh bhakt, have come to London.” The reaction was so spontaneous and so transparent that there was no doubt where his heart was. I know of a stage in his political career when he wondered whether he fitted into the BJP. I believed that he was the right man in the wrong party and that he would change one day.

But I find him changing and tilting towards the saffron forces. I can understand the pressures exerted on him within the party. I can understand his isolation. I can understand his exasperation. But I cannot understand his giving up without joining the battle. He is the same Vajpayee who had picked up the phone and had told the then Gujarat chief minister Keshubhai Patel to drop the anti-conversion bill.

I feel sorry for Vajpayee when he seeks temporary solutions to the situations he should fight against. His stand that there should be either a settlement between the two communities over the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri masjid dispute or a court verdict is commendable. But it showed him in a poor light when he compromised with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) at Ayodhya, even though he averted the confrontation.

Sending a civil servant from the PMO for receiving the two ‘shilas’ (stones), which would be used in the construction of the temple, is nothing by itself. But the VHP has interpreted it differently. It has asked the two stones to be placed on the 67-acre land around the disputed site. He should have been firm from the beginning and sent a no-nonsense message. But he wilted. Earlier, he used to stand out in the Sangh parivar crowd. Now it is becoming increasingly difficult to spot him there. Vajpayee the man has become Vajpayee the mukut.

Vajpayee’s antennas were so sensitive at one time that he would know where to go to pacify people. Now they don’t seem that sensitive. Or how do you explain that he postponed his visit to Ahmedabad for five weeks? That some consideration weighed with him is evident. But this itself indicates a change. He was unsparing in his criticism of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and the authorities when he went to Gujarat.

But when he summoned Modi to New Delhi, he was lenient. He was a chief minister who had miserably failed to cope with the situation, even if the allegations of his complicity were wrong. And here was the prime minister who did not utter even a word of criticism in the open. The PMO was at pains at that time to tell the media in private that Modi was put on the mat. Maybe, he was.

The horrified public, particularly the Muslims, expected the removal of Modi, or at least an open reprimand of a person who neither protected their lives, nor their property, let alone their dignity. Vajpayee must be naive if he has not seen through the pattern in the pre-planned rioting. Modi would have been a chastened person if he had been taken to task in the first instance. He reportedly asked the Hindus the other day to “protest.” No wonder, another round of disturbances took place. A Hindu girl was stripped and killed because she was married to a Muslim and a Hindu woman was murdered for having saved Muslims. Even if Modi is sacked now, the blot will remain.

A bit of the old Vajpayee flitted before my eyes when at the launching of a book, he said it would be better to keep one’s distance from the kind of Hindutva which was being practised by some. He was critical of Hindu fundamentalism. But there he stopped. This is his problem these days. He stops where he should begin. His government has taken no action against the VHP or its other militant wing, the Bajrang Dal. The Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO) has been made into an Act. What for? No communalist has been detained. One person recently interned was Yasin Malik of the Hurriyat Conference in Kashmir. He should be tried in an open court if the government has firm evidence. The invocation of POTO raises serious doubts.

Still the same Vajpayee asked the Gujarat government to stop the VHP’s provocative plan to carry the ashes (asthi) of the Godhra carnage victims in a procession throughout the country. Like Advani’s rath yatra, it would have ignited communal passions all over.

Vajpayee’s stint as the Janata Dal foreign minister was so accommodative that till today it is remembered in Pakistan as the golden period of relations between the two countries. He talked of soft borders although Morarji Desai, prime minister at that time, nipped the move in the bud, saying that the softening of the borders would mean an influx of spies.

Today, Vajpayee is intractable. It is understandable that after the bus journey to Lahore, he felt he had been stabbed in the back when Kargil was forcibly occupied by Pakistan. It is also understandable that Pakistan’s continued cross-border terrorism does not allow him to withdraw the forces from the front.

Still just as he has made gestures to Islamabad through the visit of Information Minister Sushma Swaraj and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman K.C. Pant, Vajpayee should restore the train, bus and plane services. Without people-to-people contact, the problems will remain insurmountable because the governments of both countries lack the will to solve them.

Whether in the context of people-to-people contact between India and Pakistan or attitude to the Hindutva forces, Vajpayee is getting less and less convincing as days go by. The defeat of the BJP, first in Punjab, then in UP and now in Delhi, is the defeat of those forces which Vajpayee resisted first and accepted later. He can still recover the lost ground by confronting the fundamentalists.

Sometimes I feel as if he is traversing a path which is not to his liking but does so because he has no better alternative. He will be surprised to find the support he has once he steps out from the beaten track. Dear Reader, please tell him that. I seem to have lost him.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.

AN unprecedented conference is taking place in Karachi on April 6 and 7. For the first time, editors and senior journalists of leading newspapers and magazines in the principal indigenous languages of Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan are meeting in the country to explore a theme of timely relevance.

The subject to be addressed is: “Newspapers and magazines in the indigenous languages of South Asia — bridges or barriers?” with the sub-theme of “the challenges of promoting collective regional approaches to peace and co-operation even as internal, bilateral and regional tensions continue in South Asia.”

In the age of linguistic globalization when English is the world’s fastest-growing language, and dozens of languages are withering and dying, the assertion of viewpoints that reflect the linguistic pluralism of South Asia becomes a positive development.

The range of languages represented at this unique conference includes Urdu, Sindhi, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Malyalam, Gujrati, Pushto, Sinhalese, Tamil, Nepalese, Dhivehi (from the Maldives) and Punjabi. While English is the common denominator, bilingual Canada (French and English) is also represented, as is German from Germany.

Though literacy remains low in South Asia with well over one billion people out of about 1.4 billion people being neither buyers nor readers of newspapers, indigenous language print media do render an influential role in forming public opinion even as satellite TV channels and radio in indigenous languages become more numerous.

Enabling communication between editors whose working languages are as different as Sindhi is from Sinhalese or Urdu is from Telugu, is good old — or bad old! — English.

Indigenous language print media in South Asia reach over 90 per cent of the newspaper-reading public in the region’s seven countries. Yet due to their sheer multiplicity and their consequent inaccessibility to those who do not know a particular language, English becomes the principal lingua franca for internal communication in some cases as also for cross-border communication between states. Governments, decision-making groups and opinion-forming elites even though English print media reach only about 10 per cent of the region’s population.

This paradox of numbers and imbalances has to be seen in conjunction with the effect that language has on the shaping of content and on the perceptions of that content by regular users of a language and by non-regular users of a language.

While this is better left for separate reflection, at this time the concern is to examine whether in a region with such a wide range of languages, it is possible to formulate a collective approach to any subject, leave alone a subject as complex as regional co-operation.

One response may be that despite the wide diversity of languages in India, the country has been able to hold regular elections over a period of 55 years to become the world’s largest entity in this particular field. But a sceptical response could well be that it is precisely because of such diversity that the country has been obliged to form a consensus on the conduct of regular elections, with periodic polling serving as a substitute for a singular language. It may also be said that it is exactly because most Indians do not comprehend what other Indians are reading or saying that, by default, they have been able to stay on course on the electoral path! But that is another story.

On a regional and international level, a wide range of languages has not been an obstacle in enabling the construction and evolution of the European Union, the greatest achievement in inter-state co-operation in recorded history.

One of the world’s most stable and prosperous states is multi-lingual Switzerland.

So the point may be made that when it comes to creating a consensus in favour of a particular process, be it regular elections or national cohesion or regional co-operation, language is a secondary factor. What matters most of all is the substance or the content of any action, as to whether it is respectful of all citizens and of all communities in a particular country and of all countries within a regional treaty.

The first place where the thesis of language being seen as a secondary factor is shattered is our own Pakistan. Perhaps the most potent root cause of the disintegration in 1971 of the original structure of Pakistan was the failure in 1948 to recognize the significance of the Bengali language as a binding element for a unique two-winged country.

In contrast, today’s Pakistan is an eloquent expression of linguistic pluralism. Urdu remains the national and, with English, the official language while Radio Pakistan broadcasts every day programmes in 20 other Pakistani languages and dialects including Punjabi, Sindhi, Seraiki, Pushto, Balochi, Hindko, Chitrali, Gojri, Wakhi and Balti, amongst others.

The conference is being organized by the South Asian Editors’ Forum (SAEF) in co-operation with the South Asian Media Association (SAMA) and with valuable support from the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society of Canada. This is the fifth in a series of such inter-actions. The first such meeting took place in June 1999 in Colombo, the second was held in Kathmandu in November 1999 where SAEF was formally created, the third was convened in the Maldives in April 2001 followed by the fourth workshop in Bentota, Sri Lanka, in February 2002.

In a relatively short period the SAEF initiative has demonstrated the capacity to build upon the work initiated by SAMAA in 1991 by bringing editors and analysts together face-to-face even at times when crisis situations have erupted in the region, whether twice in 1999 shortly after Kargil or after the change of government in Pakistan, or after the deployment of troops on the Pakistan-India border in 2002. Several actions have been taken to improve cross-linguistic communication and cross-border co-operation including the preparation of a joint paper on media by Pakistani and Indian researchers.

The theme of the Karachi Conference provokes reflections on at least four dimensions. Do indigenous languages engender as well as reinforce isolation? Some content of media will get reported and read in a way that makes language irrelevant. For example, an event such as the decision to hold a referendum or the death of the Queen Mother in Britain.

Some other content of the media is crucially shaped by the language used, particularly nuances and subtleties and the explicit usage of known buzz-words that act as triggers for pre-conceived patterns of reactions based on a host of elements such as ethnic, religious or sectarian identities. For instance, in Pakistan there are three different worlds of readership as created by the Urdu Press, the Sindhi Press and the English Press. Is there a nexus between indigenous language media and tendencies to extremism? Do the perceptual demarcations defined by different languages become hard borders and iron walls of the mind?

Can meetings marked by goodwill and the adoption of guidelines for promoting a South Asian ethos in journalism prevent the recurrence of bloody pogroms? Or prevent canals from filling up with distrust, instead of water? The international conference in Karachi promises to be a significant step in the search for answers to such questions.

The writer is founding chairman of the South Asian Media Association and a former Federal Information Minister.