Utterly frank
and direct
Ashok V Desai
The parallel
between Jairam Ramesh’s remarks about Brazil and George Fernandes’s two years
ago about China is uncanny. Fernandes could survive such a colossal faux pas
because he had votes – without his support in Parliament, Vajpayee’s government
would have collapsed. Because of our political vagaries, a South Indian from an
upper caste has no leverage; so Jairam’s political weight cannot ensure his
survival. For all his exterior mildness, the Prime Minister can be quite harsh
with those that displease him; the fate of Mani Shankar Aiyar – and his only
crime was to differ too publicly with Manmohan Singh – is salutary for all who dare
cross his path. And yet, for the reasons I shall proceed to give, a punishment
for Jairam would be undeserved and unfortunate.
Patricia Campos
Mello did not know Jairam Ramesh. He was not her first choice for an interview;
she, I am sure, would have preferred to interview the Prime Minister or,
failing him, the minister of commerce. But she came from a newspaper, Estado de
São Paolo, which was unheard of in India. Even a reporter from a well known newspaper
like La Prensa would have found it impossible to penetrate the defences of our
ministers. They have gatekeepers who jealously guard their control of access to
their ministers, rewarding friends and benefactors and excluding the rest.
There are reporters who asked a senior minister for an interview a year ago and
have not heard from his gatekeeper since. A reporter of an unknown foreign newspaper
could get access to a minister only by luck or accident. It happens that Jairam
Ramesh is the most accessible minister. He takes it as his social
function to educate and inform public opinion; and all his friends would admit
that he does it very well – he is clear, eloquent, and often devastatingly
witty. It is dangerous to be witty at the expense of the famous and the
powerful, especially if they are one’s colleagues; that is all the more reason
to admire someone who puts public duty before mealy-mouthed discretion. Anyway,
it just happened that Campos Mello reached Jairam Ramesh, and not he her.
The first half of
Campos Mello’s 600-word dispatch simply reported on Manmohan Singh’s
forthcoming visit to Brazil – the industrialists he would take with them, the
treaties he would sign, the business he would drum up for Ircon and Bharat
Earth Movers, and so on. Then she went on briefly to quote Jairam Ramesh as
saying: “The idea that India and Brazil are natural allies is a little
ingenuous – we are competitors. We compete in manufactures, and have opposite interests
in agriculture (Brazil is offensive, India is defensive), and on services, we
want to open up more rapidly than Brazil. We do not expect that an accord
between India, South Africa and Mercosur will lead to a big increase in trade,
but we think it would be an important political manifesto.” For him, India-Brazil-South-Africa
would be an important bloc of south-south cooperation like “non-alignment” at a
different time, “but from an economic viewpoint, IBSA would be a bit
fictitious. Accords like IBSA are limited [in their effects] because they have
long lists of exceptions.”
The conflict
between India and Brazil is a palpable reality. Jairam Ramesh did not invent it;
as minister of state for commerce, he has been sitting beside Kamal Nath and
watching the conflict in the WTO negotiations. And he is absolutely right about
trade. What would we import from Brazil? Soybeans? Tobacco? Coffee? Sugar? We
keep all these commodities out with high tariffs. What will Brazil import from
us? Software? Drugs? Cars? Brazil is trying to build up precisely those
industries and is protecting them.
Campos Mello’s
report was published in O Estado de São Paulo on 29 August. Indian newspapers
published it ten days later – just as the Prime Minister was preparing to leave
for Brasilia. Was someone trying to wreck the trip? Or was someone trying to
hang Jairam? That is perhaps excessive paranoia. Indian newspapers found a
juicy story and printed it. More likely, our ambassador in Brasilia, whose
embassy is not liberally endowed with knowledge of Portuguese, took time to
obtain Campos Mello’s story, get it translated and send it to South Block, or
South Block took its time to leak it to the press. One thing is certain. The
Indian press had no one in Brazil in anticipation of the visit, and did not
find out about the report on its own; someone in the government guided it
towards the story.
Did the report
wreck Manmohan Singh’s visit? He signed a number of treaties in Brasilia that
he carries in his portfolio whichever country he goes to – on drug trafficking,
terrorism, sanitary napkins and so on. These treaties are so trivial that no
head of state would refuse to sign them just because he was slightly annoyed
with the visitor. And as to the trade treaty, it is really the farce Ramesh
makes it out to be. India is a pathologically protectionist country. It goes
about signing trade treaties because other countries do it and it does not want
to be left behind. But it gives insignificant trade concessions, and
consequently gets equally poor concessions in return.
And were the
Brazilians upset by Ramesh’s frankness? I have no window into Lula’s mind, but
look at what Estado de São Paulo wrote. It said that Ramesh had simply said
what everyone knew but the Brazilian government, lost in its third-worldist
fantasy, insisted on ignoring. The Indians, like the Chinese and the South
Africans, had a clear view of their interests and pursued them in all
circumstances without being deceived by ideological illusions. The Indians won
over G-20 to a defensive negotiating position on agriculture, against the interests
of Brazil which is competitive in agriculture. Brazil could be more flexible on
services, but India would not be on agriculture. On free-trade agreements too
the Indians were more focused. They had made agreements with countries in
southern Asia and were negotiating with Japan, South Korea and countries of the
Persian Gulf. The IBSA treaty would only serve to resuscitate the non-aligned
movement in which, be it remembered, India was the leader, not Brazil. But
trade was a different game; Indians knew it, and Brazilians did not.
If we are to go
by what Estado de São Paulo said, the Brazilians have great respect for
Indians’ cleverness, our mastery of realpolitik, of which Jairam Ramesh gave a
brilliant demonstration. What must they have thought of Manmohan Singh’s mellifluous,
flowery speeches? That the Indians are clever enough to camouflage their real
intentions. And if we look at the positions we take in international trade
negotiations, at the way we lord over third-world institutions, can we say the
Brazilians are wrong? They know us, irrespective of what Jairam Ramesh tells
them. If that bothers the Prime Minister, he should change trade policy –
abolish import duties, make Indian agriculture internationally competitive, and
join Brazil as an ally in international trade negotiations. If it does not, he
should give Ramesh full marks for candour and prepare for the next meaningless,
ceremonial visit.
