Maran’s baggage

Shadow of New York and UP on Doha

If union commerce minister Murasoli Maran went to the third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation at Seattle in 1999 with a brief that allowed him to accept a “new” but “limited” round of trade negotiations, how come he has gone to the fourth Ministerial at Doha threatening to oppose a new round altogether? This question has bothered many trade policy analysts who are still unclear as to why India’s stand has become more rigid with time.

When Mr Maran began to place greater emphasis on “implementation issues”, that is resolution of differences pertaining to the Uruguay Round agreement, an agenda item that was signalled at Seattle too, many thought it was a question of tactics. When the US trade representative Robert Zoellick visited India and invited Mr Maran to participate in the meeting of trade ministers in Mexico, where a compromise was attempted between the position of developed and developing countries, to enable the US to get tough with an adamant European Union, it was still hoped that Mr Maran would soften up. There was expectation that after the Singapore meeting there would be a thaw. Mr Maran wasn’t amused. Why not?

The most important reason has been categorically stated by Mr Maran himself so many times, namely India’s unhappiness with the agenda being pushed by the developed industrial economies and their unwillingness to be adequately sympathetic on developmental issues and the implementation of Uruguay Round commitments. However, an extraneous factor has come to shape the agenda for Doha which was not relevant at the time of Seattle. This is the politics pertaining to the elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly. As demonstrated by the opposition party rhetoric at a public meeting against WTO in New Delhi this week, UP politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Vishwanath Pratap Singh had planned to dub the government’s strategy at Doha as anti-farmer. Any concession given by Mr Maran would be targeted by these short-sighted politicians. But why only accuse our politicians of political myopia? What about the tactics adopted by former US president Bill Clinton at Seattle, with an eye on US elections, and the scare tactics now being adopted by the Bush administration, using the nervousness of world markets after the September 11 terrorist attacks to push through a new trade round? Self-serving politicians are a global phenomenon. How ironical — national politics shaping world trade talks in the era of globalisation.