Weaving Dreams

By Amir Zia
Money Matters
The News
October 1, 2012

Can corporate gurus and businesspeople manage to make their voices heard in the quarters that matter? The pragmatic answer is that is that in today’s world, the economic imperative dictates foreign policy. If the people, who create and multiply wealth, really mean business, they can make a difference

The contrast was stark. In the plush environs of a hotel in the historic city of Lahore, some of the best corporate minds of Pakistan and India wove dreams of creating the world’s largest common market of 1.5 billion people and discussed the opportunities afforded by the knowledge economy. Outside, frenzied protesters in Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar set ablaze public and private property over the making of a blasphemous film, punishing their fellow Pakistanis for the sins of one living seven seas away.

The madness on the streets and the rational discourse among the participants of the Pakistan-India Management Summit 2012 titled “Dividends” created a situation replete with irony. But the subcontinent has a long history of being buffeted by the cross winds of irrationality and rationality.

Before these corporate leaders, political giants such as Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and poet philosophers Dr. Mohammed Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore witnessed great misery and greater madness. But since their times didn’t stop them from dreaming and striving for a better tomorrow, why should these times discourage today’s leaders from aspiring for peace, economic development and prosperity?

Correspondingly, peaceniks on both sides of the divided frontier are working furiously to keep this flame alive. With expressions of love for each other’s countries and peoples, these new leaders are talking of peace, resolving protracted issues bedeviling their relationship and breaking barriers. Crawling or with baby steps, these people are surely inching towards this goal.One such step was the first-ever Pakistan-India Management Summit held on September 20-21, which brought under one roof more than 80 top-of-the-line Indian corporate leaders and around 600 Pakistanis. The Jang Group and The Times of India led peace initiative – Aman ki Asha – partnered with the Nutshell Forum to organise this event, which was to enable participants to share their management experiences and challenges as well as establish relations on an institutional level.

Significantly, however, the participants weren’t just discussing the art of running and expanding business and investment empires. A key feature of many presentations was the vast economic potential of an engaged, cooperative and mutually supportive relationship between the two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours. While innovation, productivity and competiveness were buzz words during discussions about creating an impact in the global markets, thought leaders simultaneously grappled with the need to balance risk and opportunity while envisioning the face of corporations of the future.

There’s a history to this dialogue. Since its launch in January 2010, Aman ki Asha has organised and supported a number of events to boost economic and trade relations, promote cultural ties and discuss thorny political issues, including that of the divided region of Kashmir. The first business conference was held in New Delhi that year; the second in Lahore this year. And this management summit helped carry forward the agenda set in the earlier two conferences by providing corporate leaders a rare opportunity to meet and exchange views.

(A critical aspect of these conferences tends to be overlooked: the presence of foreigners in Lahore. Most businesspersons and investors today are too afraid to travel to Pakistan due to threats of terrorism, soaring crime and the poor law and order situation. And the senseless violence in the wake of the blasphemous film only reinforces that sense of fear. At such a time, attracting a sizeable contingent of Indians is no small feat and it’s for this that the organisers deserve rich kudos.)

One of the dominant themes of the conference was the fact that despite their vast economic potential and enormously talented human resource pool, around 350 million people in the subcontinent live below the poverty line.

In an excellent presentation, Shiv Shivakumar, Nokia’s senior vice president for India, Middle East and Africa, argued that the major factors holding the two countries back are their slim educational and health budgets and their disproportionally high military expenditures. If there were no military expenditures, he said, some $53 billion will be freed up for expenditure on education and health in the two countries.

Interestingly, Shivakumar’s sentiments were echoed by a number of top guns of the business and financial worlds from both countries. All, in turn, underlined the futility of confrontation and high defence spending and preached the benefits of peace and amity.

The point to remember is that Pakistan and India are the not only two countries in the world, which have border disputes. However, the other countries facing similar challenges have not stopped exploring and enhancing trade and business ties. China and Taiwan, for example, managed to boost bilateral trade to more than $100 billion per annum from $8.1 billion in 1991. Even India and China, which had bilateral trade worth just $1 billion in the 1990s, have upped this number to $60 billion.

The lesson for countries like Pakistan and India, which have more in common, reason experts, is that they can increase trade by 20 to 50 times from their existing official level of $2 billion, once they open borders and start cooperating, rather than indulging in a race to the bottom in terms of restrictive trade practices. And this slogan of intra-regional trade, say these trade analysts, can boost per capita income in the two countries to a significant level from the current $1,200 in Pakistan and $1,500 in India.

There were also interesting, new ideas floated in “the assembly of the like-minded” (as one of the speakers pointed out). In a lively session conducted Dr Sunil Gupta, Chief Learning Officer of the Ideas Consulting & Lifetime Master Trainer, there came a host of suggestions for improving Pakistan-India ties. While one group of participants wanted to educate the media to ensure good relations between Pakistan and India, another wanted a joint Pakistan-India cricket team. There were suggestions regarding exchange programmes for students and teachers; the free flow of textbooks, newspapers and magazines; the holding of interfaith conferences for hardliner Muslim clerics and Hindu pundits; the issuance of ‘honeymoon visas’ and, most remarkably, a recommendation to encourage marriages between the people of the two countries.

The key issue remains, will the corporate gurus and businesspeople manage to make their voices heard in the quarters that matter? And the pragmatic answer to that is that in today’s world, the economic imperative dictates foreign policy. If the people, who create and multiply wealth, really mean business, they can make a difference. What they need is perhaps the sense of urgency to make their dreams of a common market a reality.