The Sick List


Written by Chris Cork • Cover Stories • September 2007

A baby born at the time of Partition would be approaching old age now. Would that infant have expected to see in sixty years what we see before us today, inquires Chris Cork.

Once upon a time there was India. Just India. A vast tapestry of peoples, languages, faiths and cultures. It was ruled variously and rarely wholly successfully or in its entirety let alone peacefully, by Hindus, Muslim Moghuls and a basket of other faiths over the millennia. Its very diversity made it almost impossible to govern, and India always presented – still presents - as much a problem of management as governance.

As an unbroken entity India was last ruled by the British, who outsourced the job for much of their rule to the East India Company. India was a part of the global British Empire, an empire so vast that the sun was always shining on a pink part of the map, and the sun never set on the Empire of which India was very much the Jewel in the Crown. But empires wax and wane and by the early part of the 20th century the writing was on the wall for this latest manifestation of the empire phenomenon, and it had all but ceased to exist in less than fifty years.

The blood-boltered dismemberment of partition left body parts all over the geography, both literally and metaphorically; big bleeding chunks of post colonial corpses that were taken to a Frankensteinian sewing centre and reassembled as what we came to call India and East and West Pakistan. Whoever thought that the two-state solution had a robust internal logic clearly had a wallaby loose in the north paddock. Two Muslim states as different as chalk and cheese shackled together by some clumsy surgery, but separated by a predominantly Hindu yet politically secular India. Secular at least on paper, that is. It was never going to work, and it didn’t. Sixty years on, how does it look?

As experiments go this one has decidedly mixed results, in part because of factors that were simply unknown and unheard of sixty years ago, not the least of these being global warming. The two parts of Pakistan, twins separated at birth, unsurprisingly fell out with one-another as they grew older and lived in different houses – and so was born Bangladesh.

India, the world’s largest democracy has had its ups and downs and today, for many of its peoples, there is an enhanced prosperity and a sense of presence in the world. India is close to being a regional superpower, which its Muslim neighbours are never going to be. This does not allow it to escape the dreadful reality of poverty that engulfs, still, the majority of the population and will for generations to come. Poverty remains the defining characteristic for all three countries. In Pakistan it is rising, in India stabilizing and in Bangladesh possibly falling, though not by much but falling nonetheless. It is interesting to note that Bangladesh, the most resource-poor of the three, has perhaps come further in development terms for its whole population – rich and poor - than either Pakistan or India.

All three countries suffer from a perennial toxic crop of babies. India has come close to bringing its population growth rate down to sustainable levels, Bangladesh is beginning to move in that direction but Pakistan is literally dying of babies. Simple demography could see the end of Pakistan long before drought; disease, famine and civil disorder get a stranglehold.
A problem has surfaced in another country that has taken a more radical approach to population control. China now reaps the whirlwind of its ‘one child’ programme and is experiencing a chronic shortage of marriageable women. India is going to be feeling the same deficit within a generation as the butchery of female foetuses and infants continues in pursuit of the cultural norm of ‘sons preferred.’

There is already a skewing of the gender balance – and it can only get worse. The likelihood of the same happening in Pakistan is high, as pre-natal gender determination is increasingly available and the tests are coming down in price, bringing them closer to the pockets of the poor. Bangladesh may not have time to solve its population problem as large parts of it will be overwhelmed by the sea over the next generation, forcing the population away from the present coastlines and into the interior. A bleak future indeed.

All three countries are going to be dramatically and negatively affected in the coming century by global warming. Bangladesh will lose the most land area, but the devastation will be as great in India and Pakistan but in different ways. For them the Himalayan glacial melt is going to produce a period first of flood and then of famine. The great rivers of the Punjab will first surge and then drop back to a shadow of their former selves, followed by drought and desertification. Pakistan will lose whatever ability it has now to be self-sustaining for food, India will see its great deserts expand ever further and farming decline accordingly. Famine and a death toll in the many millions may occur within the next century as a result of these global events, all of them now far beyond human control or amelioration.

And then there is the politics. The three countries all had painful political births – followed by equally painful processes of political growth and maturation – or not, in the case of Pakistan and to a similar extent, Bangladesh. Indian democracy may not be democracy as it is practiced in the Mother of Parliaments in London, but it is a reasonable facsimile thereof, and India alone has an unbroken skein of civilian rule from partition until this day. Although the face of India Shining is forever smeared with the filth of the caste system it nonetheless has retained a powerful grip on governance by civilians for civilians using a system that is secular even if the voting patterns aren’t.

India has managed a degree of interfaith unity that allows it to elect a Prime Minister from one of the smallest faith minorities – the Sikhs – which is not only unthinkable in Pakistan but unconstitutional as well, and no more likely to happen in Bangladesh either. Indian governments change hands with a minimum of fuss and bother beyond the usual vote rigging and a handful of deaths, and the army keeps its distance. Pakistan looks close to completing a parliamentary cycle for the first time, albeit under a quasi-military dictatorship and Bangladesh is staring another period of military dominated rule in the face. All in all, political maturity seems to have advanced to the teenage years in India whilst Bangladesh and Pakistan remain in their political infancy – at least as far as meaningful democracy is concerned.

What does not look set fair in any of the three is the credibility of politics and politicians generally, who have become a debased and widely distrusted breed across the subcontinent. It is not the fudged promises and the sloppy intelligence work which has so discredited politicians in the west – it is because of plain old-fashioned corruption. The use of political power and leverage to personally enrich, to give preference to friends and relatives with jobs, contracts, land allocations – indeed in any sphere of political life where there is access to ready money and a lax oversight and regulatory system.

The use of political space to avoid taxation, criminal prosecution, the shameless and often false discrediting of opponents, the ‘disappearing’ of those whose voices are out of tune with the rulers, persecution of the press and media – a list as long and shameful as any in the banana republics of Central and South America.

Taken all together, after sixty years there is far too little on the credit side and far too much on the debit side. India will survive, both politically and as an entity, but the same may not be true of Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Could it have been seen? Avoided? Possibly not. But it could have been done a lot differently, and the responsibility, whilst now in the hands of sovereign governments, still lies in part in the skeletal hands of colonial ineptitude. It could take a century to work through the mistakes of those brief years between 1946 and 1948; unfortunately Mother Nature will do her corrosive work long before the politicians do their work to any long-term positive effect.