I represented Drishtipat in a conference titled ‘Changing Asia: forging partnerships, building sustainability’ held in Manila on 29-30 Aug. The Conference was held by the Asia Forum to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Magsaysay Award, and more details are available here. Other representatives from Bangladesh were: the Prothom Alo editor Matiur Rahman; Father Richard Timm of Human Rights Hotline; and Sharif Kafi of another NGO.

In what follows, I summarise the Conference proceedings, and where appropriate, my take on things.

The opening session

This coincided with Sen Obama’s acceptance speech, and over coffee before the session begun, quite a few participants said how they wished there was a TV showing CNN in the conference theatre. As it happens, there were two speeches in the session, and one of them more than made up for missing Obama’s speech live.

The keynote speech was delivered by Mrs Corazon Aquino. Those of you old enough to remember out political struggles of the 1980s would appreciate the goose bumps I got when Mrs Aquino walked into the theatre. However, the speech itself, with lot of statistics and homilies, was utterly forgettable.

The memorable speech was the ‘message from the next generation’ delivered by a 26-year old person named Kip Oebanda. Kip spent the first four years of his live in one of Marcos’s prisons. His parents were Maoist rebels, and his mother was pregnant with him when she was captured in a gunfight with the army. Kip grew up with social activism, and had his own project on child labour before his teen years. Listening to his life story was inspiring enough. But his main message ­– a new generation bereft of heroes and inspirations, in his words ‘who will pass the torch to us’ – resonated very strongly with me.

Plenary session 1: Resolving Asia’s contradictions - growth vs inequities

This session had four panellists: Stephen Anderson of World Food Programme; Ursula Schaffer-Preuse of Asian Development Bank; Jesse Rebredo, Mayor of a Phillipines town; and MS Swaminathan, a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament and a pioneer of the green revolution of the 1960s when he was at the International Rice Research Institute.

The session was meant to discuss what a Nobel laureate from the 1970s called the Asian drama. But much of the discussion focussed on high food prices. There was a lot of corporate bashing from the NGOs. Everyone wanted the government to ‘fix the problem’. When the ADB person tried to point out, rightly in my opinion, that the crisis was exacerbated by government actions – biofuel subsidies in the west, export bans by major developing country producers – she was booed.

I was quite impressed by Mayor Rebredo. He made a point that I found quite striking, though no one followed up on it. He noted that a lot of country-level economic statistics, whether it is GDP per capita or the millennial development goals, have very little meaning in the local level. For example, what does ‘GDP growth of 6%’ or ‘record foreign reserve’ mean to the people of Jamalpur? If we are to explore whether Gaibandha has progressed during the past decade, how would we know? He suggested, and I agree, that effort is made to establish good outcome based measures of progress at the local level.

Plenary session 2: Multi-stakeholder perspectives on building sustainability in Asia

The panellists in this session were: Stephen Heintz (Rockefeller Foundation); Antonio Aquino (Manilla Water Company); Mechai Viravaidya (Population and Community Development Association – a Thai NGO); and Arun Shourie (an Indian writer and former minister).

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect in this session, but picked up a couple of interesting points.

• The best way to alleviate poverty is through enterprise. One barrier to enterprise by the poor is of course credit. And micro credit has been tackling this over the past quarter century. But there is another problem – the poor often lacks the skills necessary to run business. Such skills involve navigating the bureaucracy etc, and governance/institutional reforms that reduce corruption etc can help. But there are also other business skills – things like basic numeracy or entrepreneurial acumen – that the poor often lacks. More attention needs to be paid to this.

• What is the appropriate role for the non-profit sector in a democratic state? If you replace the ‘non-profit sector’ with the ‘civil society’, then the question becomes something very relevant to today’s Bangladesh. To put bluntly, the government is constrained by the political imperatives, and business has to work within the economic constraints, but what shapes the non-profit sector? So far, this sector has turned out to be a catalyst of change, and fortunately (we think) the change has been for the better. But is this luck? Who is to say what the future holds? Drishtipat is, of course, a part of this sector. So the question is more than academic for us.

Arun Shourie’s talk was one of the highlights for me of the conference. Key points are summarised below.

• We must stem the rot in our public life. We don’t have public intellectuals whom we respect. We don’t trust our politicians. We expect our bureaucrats to be corrupt. How is the younger generation ever going to be motivated? I asked him to elaborate on how the situation can be changed. He was pretty pessimistic.

• A lot of community work in our countries are tied to the individual – for example, think of Prof Abdullah Abu Syeed and the Bishwa Shahitya Kendro. We need more institutionalising, but at the same time, we must guard against bureaucratising.

• We have legitimised every form of protest. We have taken moral relativism to an extreme. In this ‘post-modernism gone mad’ world, we have lost the ability to judge right from wrong. If you’re not sure what all this means, try to think about the rights and wrongs of torturing Tarique Rahman and that businessman who died in our democratic protests.

• Religion in our countries is either a private ‘deal’ with God (nafal namaz for a promotion etc) or a public display of wealth and status (iftaar parties). What is completely missing is the social reforms tradition of religion that we saw, for example, in the American civil rights movement.

Breakout session

The final hour of the first day and much of the second day was spent in the ‘break out sessions’, where smaller groups discussed one of the following topics: poverty and inequality; environment; and managing social conflict. I had a choice between the first and the last topics. While by trade I’m supposed to know a bit about the first one, I wasn’t all that impressed with the ‘evil economists vs naïve social types’ rhetoric in the plenary session, and precisely because I knew less about the last topic, I decided to attend that one to learn some thing new.

I wasn’t disappointed. To begin with, I was easily the least qualified person in the room. Among those present were representatives from the UN High Commission for Refugees, head of the Assisi Foundation (a major Filipino NGO), former head of Muhammadiyah (an Indonesian Muslim organisation of 30 million members), a former chief of Indian navy who now writes on Indo-Pak amity, an Indian MP and scion of a major Congress dynasty, Indian opposition party’s youth spokesperson and an actress, a former Naxalite leader from India who now leads a children’s welfare agency, a counter-insurgency officer of a Southeast Asian army (couldn’t catch the name), an academic on the Dalit issues in India, and other people who have worked in conflict torn zones of South and East Asia. Yes, I was easily the least qualified person.

Violent conflict between Muslim rebels and the army broke out in the southern part of the Philippines in the week of the conference, while an uprising started in Kashmir the week before. These two events dominated much of the discussion. I found the following points very thought provoking.

• There was a clear dichotomy between the ‘peace camp’ (activists/grass root workers) and the ’security camp’ (politicians/bureaucrats) with academics on both side. Fortunately, there was lot less antagonism between the two sides than in the poverty debates where the economists and social types don’t even share the same language.

• The key issue is the governance paradigm of ’state security’. All Asian states were created by imperialism or colonialism. Imperialist bureaucracies were concerned with ’state security’, and the post-imperial states, democratic or not, have continued with this tradition. What is needed is a focus on ‘human security’. If you’re not sure what this means, think about how the police in Bangladesh is used to protect the government, not the people.

• Where does legitimate protest ends and insurgency begin? What is the difference between insurgency and terrorism? As the cliché goes, one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. But beyond this cliché, there is a question about the legitimacy of violence in politics.

• There is almost always a constituency for war. An American academic who has worked in Southeast Asia for the past couple of decades noted that no one can win American presidency without establishing their ‘war credentials’.

• Violent escalation is almost never the best strategy, and is quite often a result of mistakes. Decision to escalate a conflict to the next level is quite often taken from an overconfident assessment of one’s own force vis-à-vis the enemy. For example, in 1971, Pakistan army mistakenly thought that it could pacify the country without much resistance. Given this, it is important to have a channel of communication or honest brokers who can mediate between the warring parties. (This was my 2-cents – I studied game theory at school).

Networking/other

As is usual in conferences like this, networking was a major part. Well over 90 minute of my networking time was spent with a fellow Bangladeshi participant.

I also exchanged contacts with many other participants from the region. I was the only person there who does this part-time. I had my business card, but it quickly occurred to me that it was not proper to give the impression that I was representing my employers – lesson: print a card with Drishtipat logo. However, everyone found the idea of activism that is based in four continents and is linked through the net – the fact that I have never met most of my comrades here is something I often forget – absolutely amazing. This is something we should highlight more often.

Other tid-bits

• There was a sense that education is a panacea to all our ills. However, from my studies I know that this is not the case. Lesson: write about this some time.

• I was amazed that there was very little talk about climate change, potentially the single biggest thing to affect the lives of billions this century.

• Food wasn’t the best part of the Philippines.