Following the pied piper of America

Had it been a non-BJP party and Prime Minister, the BJP would have kicked up a huge row over the government of the day letting a visiting leader read us the Constitution. If US President Barack Obama, and more so the host-government and the Prime Minister, got away with it, it was because they belonged to the BJP.

The irony of it all is the less-talked about story of the post-Obama fallout. The US President spoke about religious freedom guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution.

As if on cue, a responsible minister such as Ravi Shankar Prasad inexplicably joined the chorus on repealing portions of the Preamble.

The ‘Preamble row’ drowned the din of the ‘Obama-care’ for secularism in India.

On substantive issues, and more during the visit, there has been considerable media attention. Both nations are the world’s largest and greatest democracies. They have the Right to Information law.

Yet, again, they have chosen not to take their people into confidence on the new changes to the nuclear liability law in India. India is celebrating, not knowing what it is getting into.

When the Manmohan Singh government first signed the civilian nuclear cooperation deal, the Left under-writers of UPA-I in particular had talked about ‘selling out’ Indian interests, and India, too with it. They walked out of the government.

A whisper campaign at the time, however ineffective then and now, was that India needed US support in the international arena to get global clearance for purchase of the much-needed nuclear power plants.

But that did not necessarily imply that India needed to buy outdated American plants for a higher price. The rumours proved right for once.

Egged on by Fukushima and the Koodankulam protests nearer home, the nuclear liability law too ended up worrying the American manufacturers more than their counterparts elsewhere.

When the fine print is known, we will also know how much more Indians will pay for overseas manufacturers’ insurance premium too, and how.

The huge investments that the Americans want to make in India (and Obama has promised it now) and the why of it, the nuclear plants and the WTO issue — all these may have their own tales to tell future generations of Indians in terms of all that might have been lost, starting with ‘food security’.

Thankfully, India has not given in as yet, but going by the present mood and trend in bilateral negotiations, it’s not about whether India will blink, but when and how.

Whatever the issue, independent of whoever was/is in power, Indian negotiators should not have come to this stage without a clearer understanding of what was in India’s ‘supreme national self-interest’.

The western prescription for India on climate change and the WTO have the potential to squeeze India on the manufacturing and farm fronts if the negotiations are not handled with care and competence.

Modi’s ‘Make in India’ programme is dependent near-exclusively on foreign investments targeting foreign markets — and the government needs to be careful about it.

Anything more than a mild breeze across their economies and India would be shivering. And we have had a taste of it. This was not what the economic reforms had promised then, or later.

Manmohanomics instead ensured that the domestic savings brought less interest to the traditional investor, who still refuses to risk it all in the stock market.

Every foreigner wants to invest, we are told, no Indian investor wants to take bank credit at the post-reforms rates, we are also told. The government does not want to mop up domestic savings for making PSUs work, and has chosen the disinvestment route, instead.

Yet, no one wants to hike the interest rate on domestic savings, which cushions old-generation Indians across the socio-economic spectrum.

Their numbers are going to grow as dramatically as the nation’s population growth slows.

They are asked to go to western insurance companies, who want to have more of India with far less to ‘cover’.

The fiscal crisis of 1989 silenced the socialists — reforms won and the ruling Congress lost in 1996. The BJP’s pan-nationalists’ silence supported the Vajpayee government’s ‘second generation’ reforms.

The BJP lost the 2004 elections. It’s Manmohan Singh’s Reforms 2.0, with a ‘human face’ for the aam aadmi that won, instead. The Congress lost 2014, not to 2.0 reforms but to the permissiveness that came with it.

Today, land and labour reforms have come to mean exactly the opposite of what they had originally meant and stood for.

‘Encourage’ small and marginal farmers to sell holdings to an FDI manufacturer through land reforms, make labour-sacking easy and massive, allow the WTO to squeeze your consumer subsidy, and you would have the heavily subsidised industrial agriculture of the West selling foodgrain to sustain India.

Already, the ‘un-codified’ labour reforms of the new era have compromised subsistence income. It is a different matter that this is still more attractive than traditional farm incomes that are equally prone to drying up.

These are narratives no one wants to read to anyone, nor does anyone want to hear them from anyone else!

The writer is director of the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation

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