DEVELOPMENT: Anti-Globalisation Rally Caps Asian Social Forum

Ranjit Devraj

HYDERABAD, India, Jan 7 (IPS) - ? A mammoth, 40,000-strong anti-globalisation rally on Tuesday, marking the end of the Asian Social Forum (ASF) here, steered clear of an international investment summit in this southern Indian city that had drawn their ire.

But that was not before police arrested some 400 ASF participants who decided on their own to stage a demonstration in front of the luxury hotel where the ''Partnership Summit'' was being held here, the capital of Andhra Pradesh state.

Said Dinesh Abrol, member of the ASF organising committee: ''It is tempting for many of the participants in the rally to stage a Seattle-like situation but we have restrained them.''

''We condemn the arrests but we do not want to disrupt the summit - our rally will show the people what globalisation really means,'' said Suhasini Ali, a member of the All-India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA).

The fact that the Partnership Summit, where some four billion dollars worth of investment deals were expected to be signed, was being held at the same time and in the same city as the ASF was pure chance.

But the strong criticism of World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules on the hot, dusty grounds of the ASF venue wafted up into the airconditioned halls of the luxury hotel and into the ears of some of the staunchest advocates of globalisation.

''We give two dollars a day to every cow in Europe (as subsidy) when over a billion people in the world live on less,'' conceded Patricia Hewitt, Britain's secretary for trade and industry, at the Partnership Summit. But Hewitt also said that India needed to ''take a lead in writing the new rules of the global economy''.

Like the stray demonstration at the summit, much of the activity at the ASF bordered on chaos though few complained.

''I like the chaos. This is how a people's forum should be. . .like a fair,'' commented Ashis Bose, the well-known demographer and sociologist.

Anastasia Litiva from the Friends of the Earth group in Finland said the ASF was nothing special as international meets go, but it was a good opportunity for people come together and exchange ideas. ''This is the free flow of social capital,'' Litiva said as she marched along workers, peasants and activists carrying with them effigies of Uncle Sam ready to be burned.

Apart from people carrying large banners condemning globalisation and institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there were ox-carts and tractor-drawn trolleys carrying farmers who said they would no longer be guinea pigs for transnational seed companies. Andhra Pradesh is the most globalisation-friendly of the Indian states, but has paid a heavy price for it through the mass suicide of farmers who fell into debt buying costly but unproductive seeds, fertilisers and pesticides from these transnationals.

Kasugo Sho and Naoko Yatami from the international group ATTAC in Japan said the ASF suffered from being overwhelmingly South Asian. ''There were groups from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Korea but there could have been many more,'' they said.

Still, Sho and Yatami thought the event was successful enough for a first attempt at a regional forum linked to the World Social Forum, which is being held in Porto Alegre, Brazil later this month. They added that more countries would have participated if the organisers had more time to prepare.

India hopes to host the WSF in 2004 but many of the organisers, including Abrol, thought that the political atmosphere in India, currently led by an ultra right-wing, pro-Hindu government, was not conducive to this.

Silvia Del Conte from Florence, Italy complained that there was no link between the ASF to the European Social Forum held in that Italian city in November. ''The ESF may as well not have happened to most people here,'' she said.

But the ASF did manage to get together some of the best-known activists from the subcontinent and from South-east Asia to give direction to a growing movement.

Zaffarullah Chowdhury of the Gonoshasthaya Kendra in Bangladesh, the driving force behind the People' Health Assembly (PHA), used the opportunity to launch a signature campaign on Jan 5 demanding a return to the unfulfilled ideal of 'Health for All' set out at Alma Ata in 1978.

Walden Bello, from the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, said decentralisation was a key alternative path to development.

''If production and political decisions can be locally determined, there is no reason to have them planned at a larger national or transnational scale,'' Bello said, harkening back to methods propounded by Mahatma Gandhi, who was at the forefront of decolonisation struggles in the last century.

Abdel Jawad Saleh, a Palestinian leader, was ready to take a leaf out Gandhism. ''The only way you can get the United States to behave is by all of us getting together and boycotting American goods,'' he said.

Speaking at the ASF concluding ceremony, Mohideen Abdul Kader from the Malaysia-based Third World Network warned of an ''ambitious and daring project to recolonise the Third World with support from the WTO, World Bank and IMF and even the United Nations itself''.

India's former president, K R Narayanan, advised the ASF participants to prevent a slide back to the dark days of colonialism. ''Sacrifice for it,'' he urged them. (END/2003)