After the hangover

In last year’s budget, as a token of its intent, Pakistan cut its defence spending by a tenth in real terms and undertook to step up much-needed spending on social sectors. Conservative estimates put the cost of preparing the delivery system and computer modelling at around Rs 20,000 crore or half the annual defence budget. Even if spread over a number of years, it will raise defence costs by 15 per cent per year.

The one person who has systematically documented what it costs India and Pakistan to arm themselves — largely against each other — is Mahbub-ul-Haq, the former Pakistani Finance Minister who has authored several UN Human Development Reports and now functions from a similar centre in Karachi, which restricts itself to such trends in South Asia. One has to recall that the Brandt Commission had years ago singled out this region as one of the “poverty bowls” of the world along with sub-Saharan Africa. As it is India and Pakistan together arehome to something like a fifth of all the people on this planet.

For all the much-vaunted talk of India cocking a snook at the rest of the world and becoming a nuclear `have’, the fact remains that it is a country mired in abysmal poverty and figures towards the bottom of the list in terms of overall human indices. In the 1997 UNDP report, India was ranked 138th among 175 countries and Pakistan was literally only one notch lower. When barely half of India’s population can read and write — only 37 per cent in our neighbouring country — and it is home to the largest number of illiterates in the world, to brandish nuclear bombs and missiles smacks of self-delusion and braggadocio of the very worst kind.

In this year’s report on Asia Haq turns his inquisitorial gaze on military spending in both countries, not just in terms of the overall expenditure and the chunk of GDP that it swallows but how it diverts funds from social sectors. Together, the two spend as much as $12 billion on defence. This is almostexclusively on conventional, non-nuclear armament and the defence services.

It is important to point out that in this country, the Atomic Energy Act specifically permits the nuclear establishment to withhold information, including costs, from Parliament itself, and is therefore not subject to the scrutiny of the legislature. This writer can recall citing, at a meeting of journalists at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna some years ago, how the IAEA possessed information on India’s nuclear industry which the Indian public was denied. Ironically, it accepted this as a compliment! Although this is a UN agency and supposed to look at all aspects of this industry, it actually functions as an unashamed proponent of this form of energy and pours scorn on its critics.

As Haq observes, if the level of defence spending in both countries was cut by a mere 5 per cent a year over the next five years, it could release around $22 billion in a “peace dividend” over four times what is required to make thegoal of universal primary education a reality within this period. As a matter of fact, even a freeze on military expenditure levels at current prices will free more than enough resources to achieve the target of universal primary education. This will do far more than a few explosions within the earth, however sophisticated, to allow us to walk with our heads held high.

It is hardly any consolation that Pakistan in 1995 — the last year for which figures are available — spent over 2.5 times as much as a proportion of its GNP on defence as India: 6.9 per cent against 2.5 per cent. Or that in per capita terms, it spent $21 per head on arms that year as against $10 per Indian. Or that over that decade, it increased the number of its defence personnel by more than a fifth while India reduced it by a tenth. All said and done, Pakistan does not enjoy the same degree of democratic freedom that India does and there is always the long shadow of the generals looming over its civil society. India, as a proponent ofthe doctrine of nuclear disarmament, owes it to the rest of the world — not least to its immediate neighbour with which it has fought two wars in the last 33 years — to observe restraint and refrain from escalating the nuclear arms race.

Perhaps the most telling figure is the `opportunity cost’ of stepping up arms expenditure in terms of social sectors. There were four times as many soldiers as doctors in India in 1995 and nine times as many in Pakistan. When it came to the comparison between the two countries in terms of the number of teachers, India had five times as many as a percentage of its population. Pakistan spends on defence 125 per cent more than it does on health and education combined, as against India’s 65 per cent. (The US, for all it hectoring on this nuclear arms race, spends 46 per cent, compared to Canada’s 15 per cent, and a higher percentage of its GDP than India, at 3.8 per cent.) This reveals that both countries stand to lose terribly by increasing their military spending. But inPakistan’s case, the blow will fall harder.
D’Monte is a well-known writer on environment and development