Senseless spending

A recent media report which claims US military sales to India went from zero to $15 billion over the last 10 years clearly indicates that our romance with this non-productive phenomenon of arms will not die soon. The largest democracy plans to pump $30 billion into military modernisation.

A Forbes report from 2014 claims that the country will spend an estimated $250 billion in the next decade to modernise its military. Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar asked his ministry to project the expected cost of the upgradation programme that will see the country buy as many as 500 helicopters, 12 submarines, nearly 100 single engine fighter jets and over 120 twin-engine fighter aircrafts and aircraft carriers by 2027.

This lavish spending is the story of a country that has the highest number of people living in extreme poverty in the world. Thirty percent of Indians (224 million) live below the poverty line while nearly 800 million people live on less than $1.90 a day in 2013. Interestingly, these figures do not alarm the Indian ruling elite and its corruption-tainted defence ministry. No sense of national honour is hurt when they see millions sleeping on footpaths, consuming rotten food from garbage cans or selling their blood, kidneys and even children to meet both ends.

But India is not the only country that is throwing billions of dollars into this lethal business of arms, destruction and war hysteria. Pakistan, with a much smaller economy than India, allocated Rs860 billion to this sector last year. This may appear tiny as compared to America’s $611 billion or China’s $215 billion. But it is still a whopping amount for a country like ours that allocated a meagre Rs22.4 billion for health in last year budget.

Man (that is, the toiling masses) and nature are two components that are instrumental in creating wealth. But our gargantuan appetite for profit is destroying both. The world is spending a staggering amount of money on defence (over $1,600 billion in 2016 alone), but we have no defence against hunger, poverty and starvation. Over nine percent of the world’s population is still living below the poverty line while around three billion people live on less than $3 a day and 80 percent of world’s population earns less than $10 a day.

This economic system of greedy individuals has created islands of opulence amid the ocean of poverty. This may be the first time in the history of mankind that millions are perishing every year not because of dearth of food but the abundance of material wealth. This system has created a huge disparity between the income of the top one percent and those living on the bottom layer of social stratification.

There were an estimated 7.35 billion people on the planet in 2015 and, according to some estimates, global households have amassed $250 trillion in total wealth (an amount equal to 100x JP Morgan’s assets) in 2015. The richest one percent (about 73 million) of the world’s population owns 50 percent of the world’s total wealth ($125 trillion). According to a report of Forbes from March 2017, the number of billionaires jumped by 13 percent to 2,043 from 1,810 last year and their total net worth rose by 18 percent to $7.67 trillion – which is also a record.

So, on the one hand we are destroying the environment by waging wars and military conflicts and raising defence spending and on the other we are killing human beings by widening income inequalities. The two world wars that decimated more than 300 million people and over 200 military conflicts since 1945 have engulfed millions of people. But it seems that no amount of blood can satisfy our evil thirst for blood. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Columbia and a number of other states continue to bleed.

We are not killing people through wars and conflicts but military spending as well. The world’s armies are the greatest polluters. They are also the largest consumers of oil – one of the leading contributing factors to global warming. Do we have any idea about the damage caused by military exercises on land, air and sea? Does any report reveal the imbalance created by over 2,500 nuclear detonations that we have carried out over the last few decades? Do you know how many million hectares of land we have poisoned with explosive materials?

We are destroying nature, which provides us with raw materials, by spending on non-productive sectors like war and defence and by ruthlessly exploiting our forests, seas and lands. The exploitation of nature leads to the overproductions of goods and commodities, rendering millions of people jobless. This multiplies the miseries of the toiling masses, which are crucial to generating wealth and help to move the wheel of civilisation.

How can we justify this system where the heart of Mumbai, Rio, Karachi, Kolkata and hundreds of other cosmopolitan cities is riddled with slums and shanty towns while a few thousands oligarchs have been occupying millions of acres of lands to build the castles that they are unable to visit for decades? How can we heap praises on this system that has failed to provide the basic necessities of lives to millions of people?

But extending basic amenities is not an uphill task. According to a 1998 UN estimate, providing education, water, sanitation, nutrition and basic healthcare to the population of every developing country would cost $40 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the cost to end global poverty would be approximately $58 billion today. The solution is simple: stop this senseless spending on arms, death and destruction and divert it towards the welfare of human beings and protecting nature.

The writer is a Karachi-based freelance journalist.

Email: egalitarianism444@gmail.com