War-room story

But there’s no battle — on the frontier, anyway

There is something rib-ticklingly funny about a war-room to monitor a much-vaunted flood of imports that fails spectacularly to materialise. In the aftermath of the removal of import curbs, the war-room’s findings indicate, a fairly sharp drop has occurred in the imports of most goods bar in four or five categories. The fruits of paranoia have to be farcical, and the government has acknowledged as much by doing away with its three-week old policy of restricting the entry of these imports to a handful of places. Good for it. Much the more important war, if military vocabulary must be deployed, is the one to be fought internally. To that end the central government has done well to convene a conference of chief ministers on the World Trade Organisation’s impact on agriculture and to set up a group on agricultural exports. Evolving an internal political consensus on the liberalised trade policy, already a fait accompli but yet to be understood or accepted by the states which are to be affected by it, is of the essence.

The Congress government did the country a disservice by not getting the full political spectrum, including the political leadership of the states, on board before signing on to the Uruguay Round trade agreement. Much has been lost because of that failure, not least a good amount of time. This government seems at last to have seen fit to make a virtue of a necessity. The fact of the matter is that India cannot begin to hope to profit from the various trade liberalisations it is agreeing to internationally if it fails to allay fears at the grassroots about what this will entail — for farmers or any other group. The initial paranoia about the WTO seems to have been replaced by a sort of fatalism that dictates that India has to be a party to deals that may not be good for it. This does not have to be so, and certainly should not be so. The whole point about India’s early insistence on bringing agriculture within the ambit of trade liberalisation talks was that it hoped that rule-making would help not hurt it. With an eye being turned at last to internal domestic reform in this year’s budget, that hope should be vindicated — provided the state and local level leadership can be persuaded to deliver what is required to realise this aim.