IN THE article published in this space last week, I wrote about the eight millennium development goals (MDGs) endorsed in a UN summit of world leaders a little more than two years ago. The summit was attended by most heads of state and government, among them Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf.

Those who went to New York concluded the summit by putting their signatures on the Millennium Declaration — an extraordinary document that pledged all nations of the world to work together to eliminate, over time, poverty and hunger, disease and discrimination against the weakest segments of the population; to reverse the deterioration of global environment; and, finally, to find additional resources to achieve these ambitious targets.

The signing of the millennium declaration signalled a major change in the way the world’s rich nations look at economic backwardness in the developing world. The fight against poverty, hunger, disease and discrimination was seen as an effort in which all countries and all the world’s people needed to get involved. The moral compulsion to help the countries emerging from decades — if not centuries — of colonial domination that motivated much of the aid effort by the rich countries was now gone. Also gone were the imperatives dictated by the cold war in which the world’s two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — used aid and other ways to find friends and allies across the globe.

By the time the “millennium conferees” met in New York in September 2000, colonialism was a distant memory and the political compulsions that motivated a number of rich nations to aid poor countries were no longer there. Nonetheless, the rich were not prepared to forsake the poor. They were looking for a new set of imperatives to assist the world’s poor. The leaders of the world’s rich nations were now motivated by moral compulsions. They understood that it was morally repugnant to have so much poverty coexist with so much abundance enjoyed by their own citizens.

The awareness among the rich of extreme poverty and deprivation was heightened by a remarkable development in the post-cold war era — the growth in importance of civil society. Civil society is made up of thousands of institutions that have learnt to use the Internet not only to mobilize support for the multitudes of causes they pursue. They also use the new information technology to influence policy-makers around the globe. Democracies must deal with pressures and those brought to bear by civil society cannot be ignored by policy-makers.

Western governments have responded whenever civil society coalesced around a deeply felt objective. In the recent past there were at least four things that motivated most civil society institutions — the burden of debt carried by a large number of poor countries; the conduct of transnational corporations as they moved their operations from the developed to the developing countries; the growing human toll of diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis; and growing inequality among the countries and the peoples of the world.

There is an irony in the fact that while more articulate members of civil society despise the international financial institutions — not only the International Monetary Fund but also the World Bank — they have very effectively used the research and analyses done by these organizations to further their own cause. This was the case in all the four areas on which the non-government organizations focused their attention. Take the case of debt as an illustration of how civil society institutions developed their case using the materials produced by multilateral organizations.

That the growing burden of debt had become a serious development problem for a number of poor countries was highlighted in a number of reports published by the IMF and the World Bank. For several poor nations servicing debt claimed all the resources earned through exports. This was clearly a situation that could not be sustained for very long. These findings by the international financial institutions contributed to the campaign launched by non-government organizations such as Jubilee 2000 to deal with the developmental problems created by the enormous burden of debt carried by a number of poor countries. The Jubilee’s campaign was responsible for the combined initiative launched by the IMF and the World Bank in the mid-nineties to help the most heavily indebted countries to deal with this problem.

This initiative was labelled the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) programme and involved writing-off of accumulated debt in exchange for policy initiatives aimed at improving the welfare of the citizens living in these countries. The HIPC programme was the first time that a large global initiative was based on shared responsibilities between the donors and the recipients. This approach was to become the cornerstone of the millennium development programme.

The path to the MDG programme took the international development community through two decades of intense debate. It is useful to describe the way the approach to alleviating global poverty developed over time in order to understand what the donors expect of a country such as Pakistan. Much of the conceptual work preceding the MDG programme was done at the World Bank and the various organizations of the UN system.

In the World Development Report published in 1980, the World Bank emphasized the importance of what it called the “seamless approach to development” in which progress in one area (such as a concerted programme for improving the access of the poor to such basic needs as food, water, shelter, education and health) contributed to other economic objectives (such as improving productivity and accelerating economic growth). In its dialogue with the policy-makers and in developing some of the projects and programmes it financed, the World Bank emphasized the importance of simultaneously addressing the circumstances that, working together, kept millions of people in the world desperately poor. There were important synergies in the efforts the countries were asked to mount — in education, health, employment generation, shelter, etc.

In the World Development Report of 1990, the World Bank went back to a discussion of global poverty. This time around its approach to the subject was influenced by the way a number of countries had handled the problem of extreme economic disequilibria — rampant inflation, growing burden of external debt, large and unsustainable increases in budgetary deficits. The Bank now emphasized that in the situations marked by such disequilibria it was the poor who suffered the most. The rich had ways to protect themselves against the ravages of hyperinflation but the poor bore the bulk of the brunt. For poverty to be addressed, the governments had first to set their fiscal and monetary houses in order. The World Bank — and with it the development community — moved from the seamless web approach of the 1980 World Development Report to the sequential approach of the 1990 document.

It was with great fanfare that the World Bank began the analytical work that was to result in the third report on global poverty scheduled for publication in 2000, the beginning of the new millennium. A large team was assembled and was given two years — instead of the customary one year — to write the new document. The team headed by Ravi Kanbur, a highly respected development economist who had once worked at the World Bank as the Chief Economist of Africa, began an ambitious work programme to understand what had happened to poverty and income distribution in various parts of the world in the two decades since the World Bank wrote its first report.

As new data and information poured in, Kanbur and his team began to appreciate that the set of policies advocated by the Washington-based financial and economic institutions had delivered neither economic growth nor poverty alleviation. A new approach — or, at any rate, a new emphasis — was needed to bring about a profound change in the condition in which the vast majority of the world’s population was maintaining its existence. The popular dogma — sometimes called the Washington Consensus — had not been of much help to the poor. Kanbur and his team wished to emphasize not just economic openness and a greater role for the private sector. They wished also to promote the role of state in providing social services to the poor. In other words, the new team was going back to the emphasis placed in the 1980 report.

But the Kanbur approach proved difficult for the development establishment at the World Bank to swallow. It had been fed on the diet of the Washington Consensus. Kanbur, under pressure, resigned and the document the World Bank finally published was a compromise between those who advocated growth as the only way to address poverty and those who believed that along with growth governments had to put programmes in place aimed at directly aiding the poor.

While the World Bank was engaged in this debate, the UNDP pressed ahead with an approach that took a broader view of development. Like the Bank, the UNDP was also presenting its ideas on development in a series of annual documents that appeared under the title of Human Development Reports. The main contribution made by the HDRs was to include a number of measures in addition to gross domestic product to determine the stage of development of countries around the globe.

A new index — the human development index — was devised for this purpose. In the report published in 2002, Pakistan’s HDI was estimated at 0.499, ranking it at 138 among 173 countries for which data were provided. In terms of income per head of the population, Pakistan’s ranking was 145. The implication was clear. Even at its level of development as measured by per capita income, Pakistan was doing less well for its population. Sri Lanka — to take a counter example — was in the opposite situation. Its ranking on the HDI scale was 19 positions better than its ranking on the scale of GDP per capita. In other words, Sri Lanka had done much better for its population than was expected of a country at its income level. It is interesting and disturbing to note that most large Muslim countries were in Pakistan’s situation.

The analyses carried out by institutions such as the World Bank and UNDP set the stage for the Millennium Declaration and the goals identified in it. For Pakistan and countries in a similar situation it has become critically important to strive to meet these goals in order to receive foreign assistance they so desperately need.

NOT at all surprising. Nothing unusual. Just a laconic message from a reluctant Vajpayee, conveying felicitations (without any expression of extending cooperation) to Jamali, on his ‘appointment’/‘election’ as prime minister.

It reflected further narrowing of the Hindu mind. For years and years, a marked unfriendly attitude and a distorted anti-Muslim-cum-anti-Pakistan feeling dominated the thought process of many an Indian politician, motivated the common members of political parties, and guided their overall policies.

Like the Christian gold (‘Let there be light’), L.K. Advani recently pronounced, ‘Let there be a fourth war’; and this very gentleman told foreign reporters, in February 1998, in New Delhi that he would like Pakistan and Bangladesh to reunite with India. In his way of thinking, the countries should voluntarily come together either as a confederation or a single country.

And what was the reaction of B.L. Sharma, a senior leader of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, at the re-eruption of communal disturbances in Gujarat last September? “There can be no peace in India as long as Pakistan exists. We demand that the government end its inaction.” Sharma was convinced that the “majority of Muslims in India are supporting jihad and helping Pakistan’s aims.

The situation in India reminds one of Homer’s Odyssey, in which, Circe, a sorceress and a witch-goddess, living on the island of Aeaea, had transformed humans into animals. When Odysseus arrived and sent part of his crew to her palace, all but one were changed into a swine. For Nirad Chaudhuri, the island of Aeaea is the ‘continent’ of India, and Circe had been transposed there. In his book, “The Continent of Circe”, Chaudhuri describes the deadly capacity of India to make swine of those going to India; and he called the British in India its worst victims, (one of the last being Mountbatten).

But Chaudhuri ignored the French, who are also a fair game for the Indian Circe. Paris-born Francois Gautier has lived in India for thirty years, and has, all along, been targeting Muslims. In his latest gem, “Rewriting Indian History”, Gautier’s aberrant and twisted observation — “The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews” — is “loosed from wrings of reason.” He could easily have said that he regards the sun as darkness.

Gautier suffers from a bout of futile palaver, when, in regard to Kashmir, he says, “If, to retain the Falkland Islands, thousand of miles away from Great Britain, the English fought a war and killed innocent Argentineans in the process... if France battles to keep Corsica in its fold, an island which could as well belong to Italy, why should not India retain what has been hers for 5,000 years?” Continuing, he exhibits a visceral feeling of hostility towards Pakistan, “Pakistanis should acknowledge their inherent Indianness... Reunification should be seriously considered by the region.”

The animosity against Muslims had been handed down from past generations; and this hatred and animus filtered down to the ‘secular’ Nehru, the most anti-Hindu Hindu Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and the Hindu radical Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat. However, Nirad Chaudhuri, with a penetrating insight, has carried out a remarkable analysis of the Hindu mind. It is straight from his shoulders. Chaudhuri has not pulled punches. He writes, “All Hindus are traditionally imperialists... This aspiration to conquer and dominate was suppressed during Muslim and British rule, but today, even if not given practical expression, it conditions the attitude of the present Hindu ruling class toward the neighbours of India.”

A fanatical adherence to the myth of a superior Hindu civilization and the negative attitude of the Indian National Congress to the Muslims did not escape the attention of Nirad Chaudhuri. He says, “The Muslim League was uncompromising in its demand for a sovereign state for the Muslims with a territory for them cut out of India. The Congress attitude was totally negative... to oppose every Muslim claim and compel the Muslims to surrender their Muslim identity.” His opinion about Gandhi and Nehru is not panegyrical: “...The post-war years revealed them to be as opposed to Muslim demands as any extremist Hindu would be... It was no longer the British but the Muslims who were his (Nehru’s) enemies.” Nehru was a true Hindu under his ‘secular’ cloak.

Every Hindu was against Pakistan, and opposed it. Notwithstanding his anti-Hindu deportment and posture, Nirad Chaudhuri steadfastly and unwaveringly refused to accept Pakistan.

He was an ultra-radical Hindu in this respect, and angrily screamed, “... the creation of Pakistan... revealed itself as a crime as it did as a blunder ultimately... It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder!”

Even the British were reluctant. The Cabinet Mission Plan, 1946, did not make any specific reference to a sovereign Pakistan. There was a wave of jubilation among Hindus; and the congressmen were ecstatic. An overjoyed K.M. Munshi sent a telegram to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, on May 17, 1946: “Heartiest congratulations. Thank God, Pakistan is out of picture.” An equally exultant Patel replied, “Thank God, we have successfully avoided a catastrophe, which threatened our country... for the first time an authoritative pronouncement in clear terms has been made against the policy of Pakistan in any shape or form...”

But, very soon the ground realities changed. The principle of two successor states to British India was recognized. Notwithstanding June 3 Plan, Patel, Nehru and their ilk continued to dream of a united India. As mentioned by Ajit Bhattacharjea in his book, “Countdown to Partition”, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to K.P.S. Menon, “I have no doubt whatever that sooner or later India will have to function as a united country. Perhaps the best way to reach that stage is to go through some kind of partition now.” Nehru also assured Brig K.M. Cariappa, “But of one thing I am covinced that ultimately there will be a united and strong India.” And Nehru admitted to a British writer, Leonard Mosley, as late as 1960, “We expected that partition would be temporary, that Pakistan was bound to come back to us.” Was Nehru waiting for another tryst with destiny?

In the middle of June 1947, Nehru wrote to Sultan Sjahrir that once passions subsided “common interest would draw those parts and rest of India together, and united India would result.” Almost all the Congressmen, in the words of Sardar Patel, “nursed the hope that one day Pakistan will come back to us.” Sardar Patel came out with a convoluted logic to accept the creation of two states: “In spite of my previous strong opposition to partition, I agreed to it because I was convinced that in order to keep India united it must be divided now.” At one stage, Patel said, “What nature and God had intended to be one can on no account be split into two for all times.”

Rajendra Prasad added his voice to this chorus led by Nehru and Patel. Writing to Radhakrishnan, Prasad said, “We do not yet know what is going to happen but we are not without hope that after sometime reunion may become possible.” Within two days of the announcement of June 3 Plan, Rajendra Prasad wrote to Sachchidananda Sinha, “I am feeling that Pakistan will soon discover the utility of a union with India, and will reconsider its position, and when that happens we shall be happy...”

These prominent personalities were also the founding fathers of India’s secularism — a secularism that was and is pro-Hindu, which has produced not one but many Narenda Modis. These Modis declare that India belongs to Hindus only. Even a literary award to a non-Hindu is not tolerated. Since early November, the literary and cultural wing of Sangh Parivar of Kerala has been agitating against the state government’s decision to confer its prestigious Ezhuthachan Award to the well-known Malayalams-cum-English writer and poet, Surayya, who, three years ago, embraced Islam. If only Surayya were Kamala Das!