Agence France Presse | By SHAUN TANDON | January 7, 2004
India has for decades been a self-proclaimed champion of the developing world, but next week the tens of thousands of anti-globalisation activists meeting in Bombay will find a country increasingly embracing capitalism.
The World Social Forum -- six days of talks, debates and concerts on issues ranging from white-collar crime to the plight of peasants -- was set up in 2001 as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum which each year extolls the virtues of free trade.
The first three World Social Forums were held in Porto Alegre in Brazil, where President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, elected in 2002, has emerged as a symbol of the leftist movement.
There is no thought that Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee will take over the mantle as the next anti-globalisation poster boy.
In New Delhi, officials asked how they feel about hosting thousands of angry leftists have little to say, as they are more preoccupied monitoring warming relations with rival Pakistan and managing surging economic growth that clocked 8.4 percent in the quarter to September.
Subhir Gokhran, chief economist at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, an advisory board chaired by the central bank head, said he only recently heard of the World Social Forum through friends and a newspaper article.
"There's no buzz in Delhi about this event," he said.
He noted that Vajpayee visited more than 20 countries in 2003, with all the trips "driven by clear-cut commercial, economic or security interest."
"Within the government there is a tendency to start to think globally, to think about the benefits about these sorts of relationships," he said.
"This anti-globalisation sentiment is not on the front burner within the government."
It used to be quite different.
Independence hero Mahatma Gandhi famously championed "swadeshi," or "self-reliance," arguing it was better to pay a premium price for an inferior Indian product and benefit the community than to buy goods imported from colonial ruler Britain.
The first prime minister Jawharlal Nehru, in his "tryst with destiny" speech at independence from Britain in 1947, pledged to work for "India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity."
Under Nehru's stewardship, India became an activist among nations, pursuing strict economic protectionism at home and helping start the "Non-Aligned Movement" of countries that refused to throw their cards with either the United States or the Soviet Union.
But with the Cold War over and its foreign reserves paltry, India in 1991 began switching to a free market. Today everything from electronics to French cheeses -- once attainable only through a bribe to an airport customs agent -- stock the shelves in the once Soviet-like shops of India's cities.
The government touts the development, but more than half of India's billion-plus people remain dependent on agriculture, subject to the fickle monsoons and, in officials' view, to the hefty subsidies Western countries provide for their farm exports.
It was the farm subsidies that prompted India -- along with Brazil, South Africa and 19 other countries -- to form a developing world bloc at the last World Trade Organisation talks, grinding to a standstill the September session in the Mexican resort of Cancun.
"The feeling was that a few countries were trying to benefit more than the others," said T.S. Vishwanath, an international trade specialist at the Confederation of Indian Industry, one of the country's main commercial lobbies.
"So the undercurrent you'll find is that India and a lot of other countries are going to be a lot more aggressive at multilateral forums," he said.
"They want to ensure the agenda is balanced, but it's not an anti-globalisation feeling."
To Gokhran, it was the "sense of triumph from Cancun that moderates the anti-globalisation voices."
"If the perspective was that we were beaten down, then you would have seen a far more vocal anti-globalisation movement."Agence France Presse:
