Let the electricity connect us

India and Pakistan’s commerce secretaries are meeting in Islamabad in the coming week and ostensibly on the agenda is Delhi’s offer to sell electricity to Pakistan. On the face of it, the mind boggles, having had to deal with the physical and psychological frontiers of our times. But here’s the thing: Can we both take a deep breath, put on hold our common prejudices, and just for a moment, try and put into practice that much-abused term “think out of the box”?

After all, if the distance from Amritsar to Lahore is a mere 30 kilometres, and if until a certain year called 1947, North India’s power grid distributed both heat and light without worrying about religion, caste or colour — Indian and British, I mean — considerations, then why can’t post-independence subcontinentals find a way out of our common mess?

So here’s a plea to Islamabad: Don’t turn down Delhi’s offer on the proposed electricity sale by saying, let’s find a solution to Kashmir first, or, order India to mind its business and stop poking its nose in Afghanistan — the unspoken message being that all the space between the Syr Darya and the Khyber Pass is part of Pakistan’s sphere of influence.

First, take a look at India’s recent foray into commercial diplomacy with its neighbours. Over the last year, since the return of Sheikh Hasina as prime minister of Bangladesh, Delhi has offered to join its eastern grid with Bangladesh and offered 100 megawatts free of cost on an experimental basis. That’s peanuts for the kind of win-win situation both Delhi and Dhaka anticipate, both in terms of cutting costs, streamlining transmission lines and getting customers to buy bijli. Just imagine the combined market that Eastern India and Bangladesh would offer!

That’s not all. We all know that over the past couple of decades, India has been investing in hydro-electric projects in Bhutan, with the result that the remote Himalayan kingdom now produces more electricity than it can comfortably use. So, guess what, a big percentage is re-exported back to energy-hungry India, for farmers and businessmen and ordinary folks like you and me in the north and eastern parts of the country, to use to work our tube wells, generators, street lighting, etc.

Interestingly, some of this electricity will be streamed into the same eastern grid with which India is so generously offering to connect Bangladesh.

Most important, Bhutan is selling this electricity back to India, not giving it away free, thereby earning precious foreign exchange. For a landlocked, hilly country like Bhutan, which doesn’t manufacture too many things or grow food to export, this is a big deal. The moral of the story here is that there’s no altruism at work here, only sheer economics.

I’ll give you a third South Asian example. Since before the end of the civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the rest of Sri Lanka in mid-2009, Delhi has been offering to integrate Colombo and the rest of that country, with India’s southern electricity grid. Talks are still on over that proposal, but Colombo seems more than interested.

Some of you may wonder why. It’s simple, really, and has to do with the economics of maximising resources, a kind of return to the economic integration that existed pre-1947, but it can only work if countries are willing to put their inherited prejudices on hold, as well as jingoistic nationalisms and think how their ‘people’ will benefit.

I think that Delhi should do much, much more, especially in the wake of Manmohan Singh’s invitation to Yousaf Raza Gilani to watch the cricket match last month and the likely offer to sell electricity to Pakistan. In the wake of the IMF’s reported refusal to give Pakistan the $11 billion loan it wants to help run the country, Delhi should offer to bridge the vacuum.

Takes two hands to clap? Sure. Remember that the commerce secretaries are not talking about bringing the Mumbai terrorists to book before making the electricity offer. Let Pakistan think of new and creative ways to respond.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 25^th, 2011.