With due apologies to the author, whose name I regrettably omitted to write down, I am tempted to start this column with a quote from a recent issue of Business Today.
"The media in India has a great ability to convert a silver lining into a dark cloud. India's single largest problem is a very negative media (which) can't believe (we) are so successful."
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Nevertheless, after all the self-congratulations on how India led the exploited developing countries against the perfidies and machinations of the developed world, and ensured that the Cancun ministerial meeting ended in a failure, I am not sure about what exactly have we gained.
Apart from the sobering thoughts expressed on the subject from more learned columnists like Shankar Acharya and others, my own doubts about the "great victory" are born as much from the wholehearted glee with which the Swadeshi Jagran Manch welcomed the failure of the negotiations and lionised Arun Jaitley on his return. (One wonders whether he is comfortable with the accolades showered on him by the SJM!) But this apart, after reading the reports and opinion pages of both the Indian and the foreign press on the subject, the broad contours of the major issues are quite clear:
Agricultural subsidies in developed countries certainly affect the ability of developing countries to compete. But do we have a clean slate on the subject -- free power, free water, fertiliser subsidies and so on?
Is there any realistic hope that the US would abandon agricultural subsidies with the presidential election approaching? Is it not much more likely that multilateral negotiations having failed, bilateral arm-twisting will be resorted to? How many developing countries have the economic strength to resist such pressures? One would suspect that even China and its pragmatic leadership would choose to compromise rather than stick to "principles", which many developing countries themselves violate. Is not all politics, domestic or international, the art of the possible?
Is there a possibility that the scrapping of textile quotas could be delayed, doing incalculable harm to us? Already, there are hints that the US would delay the restoration of the Generalised System of Preferences benefits on 742 Indian products.
The SJM believes that the World Trade Organisation "will do incalculable harm" to Indian interests, as S Gurumurthy has argued. It wants India to get out of the WTO and pursue the bilateral trade agreements route. This is dangerous, romantic nonsense.
In many ways, the WTO is the most democratic international organisation with one member, one vote, as compared to the UN and its five veto empowered members, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank with voting power determined by quotas/shareholdings.
In fact, India has been the most frequent user of the anti-dumping provisions of the WTO agreements despite having a minuscule share of world trade and some of the world's highest import duties, which, as T N Srinivasan and Suresh Tendulkar point out in Reintegrating India with the World Economy (Oxford University Press), have actually increased since 1996-97.
One possible corollary of the failure of multilateral negotiations is likely to be a proliferation and strengthening of bilateral/regional trade agreements. The European Union, Nafta, Mercosur, Asean and so on already exist.
The Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation encompasses, in effect, a greater Asean, inclusive of China and Japan, and aims at free trade. We are not part of any of these powerful groups -- yes, we do have a south Asian trade agreement of sorts which is going nowhere.
It is against this background that one needs to welcome the recent free-trade agreements entered into by India with Asean, Thailand and Singapore.
A crucial issue from the perspective of the political economy is whether our political masters would confront the SJM and its Marxist allies in an open debate on the subject, with conviction and articulation which today only Arun Shourie displays.
They would need to "market" globalisation, the benefits of free trade and WTO to developing countries, to the people of India; pointing out also that every country that has moved up the ladder from poverty to at least middle class prosperity -- Thailand, Malaysia, Korea and indeed China -- has done so only by embracing globalisation.
Or will electoral politics dictate a different stance avoiding confrontation within the Parivar, overlooking the laws of economics, placating everybody with the slightest grievance about free trade in a futile attempt to make an omelette without breaking eggs? I, for one, fear so, despite firmly believing that, in terms of globalisation, we have "nothing to fear but fear itself".
Tailpiece: Three former prime ministers -- V P Singh, Deve Gowda and I K Gujral -- who should know better, supported a pre-Cancun rally in Delhi, which labelled the WTO as the World Terrorist Organisation.
Two of them were in office after the birth of the WTO and did nothing to withdraw from the membership. The sheer hypocrisy is breathtaking!Powered by 
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