HT Home / Blogs Home >
Cutting The Edge / Research / 17 days to G20: look who’s driving the G20 agenda
17 days to G20: look who’s driving the G20 agenda
With anti-protectionist policies on top of G20 finance ministers’ March 14 communiqué, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Congress trouble-shooter and finance minister Pranab Mukherjee can safely claim to have set one line on the global finance agenda.
By keeping pressure on the expansion of Financial Stability Forum (FSF) to include voices from the East and ensuring it happened, once again, the UPA government scored a small brownie: on March 12, a hallowed institution with a hallowed mandate, finally expanded its membership to include “Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey. In addition, Spain and the European Commission will also become FSF members.”
Along with its BRIC brethren comprising Brazil, Russia and China, India has sought greater voting rights in the way International Monetary Fund functions. And that’s likely to happen as well.
A few years ago, while interviewing the head of state of one of India’s leading trade partners, I had raised the issue of whether that country would support India’s seat in United Nations Security Council. He went off the record and said: “Yes, we will. But what is the point of being in the Security Council? India needs to tell us what it proposes to do there. It has to earn its seat.”
To my mind, the troika of Singh-Ahluwlia-Chidambaram (and now Mukherjee) backed by a strong team in North Block have done just that — earned India a place on G20 — by demonstrating intellectual leadership in the area of global economic diplomacy. What this intellectual leadership lacks in experience, it has more than made up with growth.
With these earned stripes in the international economic arena behind it, India is gradually becoming an active builder of the new global financial order — and is one of the important agenda setters. Just how far India’s voice on anti-protectionism, on IMF reforms, on H1-B visa norms and so on is finally heard, we’ll get to know on April 2. My reading: G20 will pause, hear and implement much — not all — of what India suggests.
The new government that comes to power in May needs to get ready to strengthen this leadership — the source of which is economic growth in an era where global GDP is expected to contract by 1-2 per cent as World Bank president Robert Zoellick said on March 11, a day before India entered FSF — forward. For, finally, a stable, secure and growth-catalysing global financial system is in everyone’s interest: countries, companies, consumers, investors.
That’s you and me.
(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Gautam Chikermane on Monday, March 16, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Filed under Research · Tagged Congress, G20, Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee
