No need to aim for IMF top job

Late last month, Dr Manmohan Singh gave the world a flavour of his remarkable capacity to appear profound while saying nothing. Using the occasion of a press meeting in Addis Ababa toward the end of his Africa visit, the Prime Minister took a moment off to intervene in a global event that had rocked the European Union and the United States ever since Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexual assault.

As Europe rallied behind Ms Christine Lagarde, France's Finance Minister, for the vacant job of the head of the IMF, Dr Singh, echoing the views of the BRICS group thundered at Europe, reminding the Western powers that “the reforms of the Bretton Woods institutions are high on the agenda of the developing countries”, meaning that they intend to throw their hats in the ring and that France or Europe cannot assume that the IMF is their property.

Then almost immediately he backtracked: striking what one press report coyly described as a “realistic position” (implying that the earlier stance was fantasy), the Prime Minister resigned himself to the possibility of Europe having the last word on the choice of IMF's leader. “We have to realise that international relations are all about power relations. Those who wield power will not yield easily.”

DIFFERENT FROM IMF

But he had set the fantasy ball rolling; various media and commentators haven't stopped yearning for or demanding the occupation of the highest office in the IMF by someone from the emerging economies — that is, by an Indian. The Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, was more subtle but echoed the sentiment, referring to the BRICS position that getting an European to head the Fund once again would not do and that the Indian government was “trying” to build a consensus among developing countries to look for a suitable candidate outside Europe.

A few questions need to be asked here: why is BRICS so keen on getting one of their own into the IMF's highest office, apart from the status it confers? What is the BRICS if not a pastiche of expedients with hidden agendas? Russia and China have great-power aspirations not different from those exercised by the US and the EU at varying stages of the 20th century.

Brazil, India and South Africa appear, by virtue of their history, colonised victims now seeking their place in the sun. But their collective memories are vastly different from that of Russia and China and in some unique ways similar to one another. In their evolution to modernity, however refracted by the history of colonialism, they represent the best of ‘rainbow' universalism — a counterpoint to the dominant Western discourse that human progress involves a unilateral and uni-dimensional way of life.

Which other bloc of countries among the emerging economies encompasses a greater range of multi-layered existence than these in virtually every sphere of human endeavour: the small enterprise cheek by jowl with the large, the informal economy with the formal, a living palimpsest of communities jostling for space in an accommodative way? What the IMF tries to do is to erase those palpable differences, to close the space of infinite possibilities and smother the multidimensionality of history and geography so as to fashion an ordered pattern of economic behaviour, based on the assumption that progress simply needs a constant rejection of the restraining hand of collective and often traditional guidance.

What can be more ironic than Iceland, happy with its cod-fish economy for centuries, being hustled into becoming a financial work-station for Wall Street, only to collapse when the chips fell in September 2008, or that Haiti should be offered a bailout with the usual IMF prescriptions, as if it were no different from Portugal or Ireland?

Should India seize the ‘Winter Palace', what should we expect to change? The IMF's power has been weakening rapidly, not because the BRICS “stand together” but because the US and Europe ignored the rules of the institutions they created, establishing their own financial architecture of domination till it collapsed.

EMPTY INSTITUTION

The IMF is a hollow symbol of its original mandate; it failed to police reckless Wall Street bankers in the US and Europe and blindly endorsed a Wild-West type of economic model that continues to send peripheral European countries sobbing at the sink. Flouting the multilateralism it attempted, and succeeding often in imposing a wilfully ignorant, unilateral antidote, its history is a chronicle of ignorance, failure and perniciously false advice that sent many developing nations spinning into debt. And at this stage it has become nothing more than a lender of last resort to the growing numbers of victims of harrowing debt, most of them in Europe.

CREATE ALTERNATIVE

When Indians yearn for one of their own as head of that scooped-out symbol of global arbitration and multilateralism they assume that it would confirm their country's long march from its colonial past, beginning with Independence and culminating in its ascent to the richest club. But would it?

India should stop chasing shadows, shed the tired discourse of multilateralism preached by an exhausted WTO and the Fund (both unable to police the increasingly aggressive bilateralism of the US and Europe). Instead, it should enrich its inchoate ambitions for strategic intervention in a far more complex and increasingly fracturing world. India has to evolve its own brand of multilateralism that embraces and propagates the diversity of human existence.

( >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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