In the spring of 2006 this newspaper published a report quoting a letter written by Congress party President Sonia Gandhi to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in which she had expressed concern about the impact of a free trade agreement (FTA) that India was at the time negotiating with the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) on India’s plantation economy.
Ms Gandhi was reported as saying that she was concerned about the FTA being signed by the government since the country’s domestic agriculture sector was in distress, particularly areas like edible oil, coffee, tea and pepper. “The Congress party [therefore] feels,” the letter said, “that instead of opening up the agricultural and manufacturing sectors through FTAs, more effective domestic policy measures need to be adopted to protect and strengthen the growers and manufacturers in these sectors.”
Enquiries revealed that the letter had perhaps been drafted by a Congress party functionary, now a Union Cabinet minister, and subsequently leaked to the correspondent of this newspaper. Once the letter became a public document, the prime minister was constrained to defend the FTA negotiations in public and his reply to Ms Gandhi was disclosed.
In his reply, Dr Singh argued, “Our approach to regional trade agreements, in general, and FTAs, in particular, has been evolved after careful consideration of our geopolitical as well as economic interests [emphasis added]. Although India has a large domestic market, our experience with earlier relatively insular policies, as also the global experience in this regard, clearly brings out the growth potential of trade and economic co-operation with the global economy.”
Without grasping the significance of Dr Singh’s reference to the “strategic” dimension of the India-Asean FTA, the Left Front decided to fire at the prime minister from his party president’s shoulders and led a high-powered delegation to the prime minister to protest against the FTA.
Led by the then chief minister of Kerala, V S Achuthanandan, the delegation comprised the state’s highly talented finance minister, Thomas Isaac, and the deputy chairman of the Kerala state planning board, the distinguished Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik.
All three spoke at length about the harmful impact of the India-Asean FTA on Kerala’s plantation economy. They may have assumed that they had put Dr Singh on the defensive, more so since his own party president had raised the issue with him.
Dr Singh began with a long explanation of what the FTA would achieve, in his usual soft-spoken style. He then delivered the punchline in his deadpan, bloodless style. “I am told,” he said, “that an important beneficiary of the FTA would be the fraternal, socialist republic of Vietnam. Our comrades in Vietnam would be able to sell more pepper and coffee to us.”
Dr Isaac was the first to burst out laughing, and everyone cheerfully joined in. The meeting was over. The India-Asean FTA could not be completed within the term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA-I), but was one of the first trade deals that the new trade minister of UPA-II signed.
Last week Vietnam President Truong Tan Sang and Dr Singh agreed to set a bilateral trade target of $7 billion for year 2015, and President Sang promised to help speed up the India-Asean services and investment agreement that is still under negotiation.
A decade ago I found myself at a conference in Shanghai on globalisation. An elderly professor from Canada spoke at length about the harmful impact of globalisation. He was probably under the impression that his Chinese audience would appreciate his views. He was followed by a young Vietnamese scholar who stunned the audience with his opening line: “Vietnam wants more, more and more globalisation!” In the past decade, Vietnam has walked the talk.
My generation grew up admiring the resilience and patriotism of the Vietnamese people. As students in 1975, we celebrated the defeat of United States forces and the victory of the Vietnamese people. The slogan “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, we shall fight, we shall win” resonated on many Indian campuses that year.
Today Vietnam has become the cynosure of all those who wish to see Asia globalise and reintegrate with the world economy. The pragmatism and creativity of a new generation of Vietnamese have become the new source of inspiration in developing Asia.
Blinded by the bright colours of the successful Asian Tigers and China, most Indians today pay little attention to the tremendous achievement of the people of Vietnam. A nation once razed to the ground, it now stands tall as a new tiger of Asia.
Vietnam’s links with India go back many centuries to the age when Hinduism struck roots in the easternmost corner of the Asian mainland. This is a history that today’s Vietnam does not wish to recall, for understandable reasons since it is a history of conquest and alien rule. However, that history demonstrates that India and the Hindu religion and culture were very much part of this Asian underbelly going all the way from the Indus and the Ganga to the Mekong.
History, geography and economics have once again combined to bring the two together within the context of the new geopolitics and geoeconomics of Asian change. The India-Vietnam relationship is one of the most well-rounded bilateral relationships that India has with any country in the world because there is substance to every dimension of the bilateral relationship.
That is, there is a robust government-to-government equation, a growing business-to-business engagement and a nascent people-to-people relationship (P2P) based on the firm foundation of history and culture. The growing popularity of Vietnamese cuisine in India is proof of this growing P2P engagement.
