Posturing on globalisation

IT IS NOW almost conventional wisdom for political leaders and heads of Government and state to express disquiet about some aspect or the other of globalisation. The U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, has often cynically questioned the fallout of globalisation on labour and the environment, the French President, Mr. Jacques Chirac, has raised issues of the threat to national culture and the heads of multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and even the World Trade Organisation have been warning their audiences about the need to make global economic integration a more equitable phenomenon. Now the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, who ever since he assumed office has been an unabashed supporter of globalisation in words, if not deeds, has decided to join the chorus and pose some questions about globalisation. But like much of the public utterances of the world leaders, Mr. Vajpayee's interventions are more in the nature of swimming with the current of public protest rather than reflecting an inclination to shape the process.

Mr. Vajpayee has cited the international protest movement against globalisation to ask at the India Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum if the public criticism is born of resentment against an inequitable distribution of benefits or if it is really a failure to communicate the true benefits of globalisation. It is a measure of perhaps how seriously the Prime Minister takes such criticism of globalisation that while he has referred to the series of street protests over the past year from Seattle to Prague, no mention is made whatsoever to the opposition at home by a number of economic groups to the same process of a dismantling of national barriers. At the core of Mr. Vajpayee's arguments is that globalisation will be ``universally acceptable'' only if it is ``universally beneficial''. There is nothing exceptional in this, except that the proposals that the Prime Minister has made to achieve this in India are equally unexceptional. The only one of any substance in the proposed partnership between Government and business is his call for each of the 4,300 members of the Confederation of Indian Industry to adopt at least one primary school and one health care centre to supplement the Government's efforts. Irrespective of how the CII and other chambers of business respond to this suggestion, this, as Mr. Vajpayee himself called it, has to do more with dealing with the image of globalisation than its content.

The NDA has travelled a long way from a year ago when in the first flush of enthusiasm of forming a Government again in New Delhi it signalled to business and industry that it would draw up and carry out an ambitious reform agenda. That agenda has long since floundered on the rocks of opposition not so much from people and groups affected by reform as from constituents of the NDA itself, each of which has sought to preserve its own domain of influence. An additional source of pressure has come from the RSS which has not let up on its Swadeshi campaign. But it is also true that grassroots opposition to the globalisation of the Indian economy is strongly rooted in the feeling that a decade of fairly rapid growth has benefited some more than the others. Without a greater percolation of the benefits of growth, measures for a further globalisation of the Indian economy will continue to face as much political opposition as they have in recent years.

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Section  : Opinion
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