COMMENTARY
Harboring hatred will not get India, Pakistan anywhere

By Tom Plate

Almost nothing in the world seems less likely to happen than an India-Pakistan peace treaty. Yet isn't it the moral responsibility of the leaders to manage tension, not exploit it? Why aren't these two struggling nations working together in an alliance for mutual progress instead of lobbing mortar shells at each other?

Pervez Musharraf lives in fear of political extremists.

In Pakistan, with its 142 million people, the government of military ruler Pervez Musharraf lives in fear of organized political extremists: the militant jihad groups in neighboring Kashmir and their allied blood brothers in the country's regular armed forces, Musharraf's primary political base.

In India, with its 1 billion-plus people, the government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee bows to extremists of the majority Hindu populace, who are largely hostile to Islam, the primary religion of Pakistan.

So what we have now in South Asia is potentially the equivalent of the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Religion is easily — and, often, correctly — blamed for such tense crises. But the basest politics can become a kind of religion, too, when domestic constituencies are viewed as having god-like powers.

Consider the example of the otherwise cosmopolitan government of Jacques Chirac, which, like all its predecessors, kowtows to the antediluvian farmers of rural France, their cranky tractors rutted permanently in the past.

In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party — which is neither liberal nor democratic — caters to special-interest lobbies, ranging from the construction industry to agriculture.

And in the United States, there's the spectacle of the Washington establishment, outspokenly pro-free trade, yet protective of the country's rusty steel mills and fat-cat farmers, fearful of global competition like some scared European government.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee kowtows to the whims of the Hindu majority.

India, which before long may boast the world's largest population, needs to develop a lot more economic steam, not fuel the engines of religious hatred.

Pakistan, one of the world's poorest nations, should extend the vision of its ambitions beyond coveted Kashmir and hated India. India and Pakistan can't afford to destroy each other when they can't even feed their own populations.

The buck stops with each government.

The people of South Asia will have been betrayed if the region winds up in flames. The function of competent statesmanship is to avoid the horror of war and build a sustainable peace, without which economic development is impossible.

Yet, somehow, the subcontinent is drifting toward conflict, as did Europe in the 1940s.

What's the excuse?

There is no Hitler in South Asia, despite the efforts of the Indian propaganda machine to paint Musharraf as such.

Who, really, is the Pakistani president?

If not Hitler, is he an Anwar Sadat in the making — the late, great Egyptian leader who maneuvered his domestic public opinion to a peace treaty with Israel? Or is he like the late Yitzhak Rabin, the masterful Israeli general who came to power and maneuvered for peace?

Sure, Sadat and Rabin were assassinated — not by foreign devils outside their own borders but by enemies within their own countries. For their courage and vision, they were sent to their graves by extremist countrymen.

Even so, these days Asia is no barren desert of leadership.

• China has Premier Zhu Rongji, the dogged but internationally respected champion of the mainland's internal economic reforms.
• Malaysia has the outspoken Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed. Derided by the West for years as a Muslim extremist, the good doctor has now, given his continually canny management of religious extremists within his own back yard, shown himself to be one of the more sensible souls in the Muslim world.
• Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his effective successor Goh Chok Tong, notwithstanding critics at home and abroad, will be viewed by history as leaders who contributed to regional peace and stability as well as domestic development.

Asia thus has an established standard of leadership against which Vajpayee and Musharraf can measure themselves. That way, they can stand tall — as can their own people, the region and the world. A South Asian Sadat needs to go to a South Asian Israel.

Who will rise to the historic opportunity?

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.