on the spot
Tavleen Singh
To try and understand the reasons why almost every opposition party colluded to stall Parliament until a vote on FDI in retail was permitted I watched as much of the debate as I could. And, I confess that at the end of listening to long hours of speeches the conclusion I came to was that our opposition leaders, from the extreme left to the extreme right, have remained stuck in an economic rut that they should have pulled themselves out of at least a decade ago. If they had been paying attention to the winds of economic change that blew away the Soviet Union, transformed eastern Europe, tore down that wall in Berlin and converted China into a capitalist country they would not have argued the way they did. There certainly would have been less talk of the East India Company. Personally I could hardly believe that our elected representatives have remained so oblivious to economic realities that they could even make the comparison between Walmart and the East India Company. I could hardly believe that they thought of India as a such a fragile country that it could be colonized by a handful of multi-national retail giants.
The oddest thing about the debate was that leaders from the extreme right like Sushma Swaraj to those on the left like Mulayam Singh Yadav appeared to be in total agreement that the arrival on Indian soil of international retail giants like Walmart would further impoverish India’s farmers. It reminded me of arguments that I heard in the early nineties when the process of economic liberalization began and was opposed virulently not just by leftist politicians but nearly every NGO including those who depended on funding from foreign donors. I remember being visited in Delhi by a motley collection of swadeshi types from the RSS and NGO activists who tried to convince me that the arrival in India of international seed companies like Monsanto was going to destroy Indian agriculture. It happens that I have a brother who is a farmer. He has a farm in Haryana about two hours drive from Delhi where he grows wheat and rice and vegetables. By this I mean that he is a fulltime farmer and not the dilettante kind that have mushroomed on the edges of Delhi.
Whenever I am in doubt about some agricultural issue I ask my brother’s opinion. So when the activists came to tell me that foreign seed companies were going to exploit Indian farmers because they would have to buy seeds every year I asked his views. First he told me not to speak to him about the views of ignoramuses then he said, ‘Do these people not know that with hybrid varieties we have to buy fresh seed every year in any case? And, as for exploitation nobody has exploited Indian farmers more than government seed companies.’
So last week when the debate on FDI in retail began I rang my brother and asked him to share his thoughts on the subject. I told him about an article I read in the Times of India last Wednesday by two Dalit writers, Chandra Bhan Prasad and Milind Kamble, in which they argued that FDI in retail should be welcomed. Their view was that it would break the stranglehold that middlemen called ‘adhtiyas’ have on all farmers’ markets. They control prices, the movement of farm goods and even such things as loading and unloading produce. It is our poorest farmers who become their worst victims because they are forced often to sell at prices lower than they can afford because of the perishable nature of their goods. The Dalit angle to this excellent article was that there are no Dalit e‘adhtiyas’ because there is an upper caste monopoly on this line of work.
My brother had not read the article but agreed that the ‘adhtiya’ hold on farmers markets needed to be broken. He said, ‘These guys can do pretty much what they like because they control all farmers markets and if newer markets are opened with the arrival of foreign retailers their hold will be broken. Nothing better can happen from the viewpoint of farmers.’ When I asked if small scale vegetable sellers would be affected he said that he was not at all sure that even this would happen. ‘Do you remember,’ he said ‘that when people like McDonalds were allowed into India these same politicians said that it would kill off the samosa and pakoda walahs? The opposite happened. These guys are doing better business than ever because the competition made them clean up their act so now even street vendors sell more hygienic food.’
Why did we not hear the farmers viewpoint even once during the debate in the Lok Sabha? Could it be because the opposition parties were just playing politics with a serious economic decision? It certainly seems that way. As Kapil Sibal so eloquently pointed out during the debate the final decision on whether FDI will be allowed in the retail sector is in the hands of state governments. A chief minister who does not want to allow it can quite simply forbid foreign retailers from entering his or her state. So was there really any point in insisting on debating the issue under a rule that allowed voting? The short answer to that question is: no.
What saddened me as I listened to speaker after speaker make long dreary speeches that made exactly the same point was that the most obvious need in Indian politics today is for a genuinely rightist political party. How ironic that a government led by the proudly left-of-centre Congress Party should be arguing the case for the right. The Congress has leftist economics embedded in its genes. So its leaders believe in investing in massive welfare programmes for the poor and underprivileged rather than in investing in empowering the poor by building rural infrastructure. That this idea has not worked is evident from the fact that 300 million Indians remain below a shameful poverty line 65 years after the British Raj packed its bags. A truly rightist political party would have moved away from the welfare route and concentrated on investing in the tools of empowerment. Roads, electricity, schools and hospitals. The FDI debate has proved that what we need today is a political party with rightist economic ideas now that the BJP has shifted so completely to the left. What a disappointment the debate was.
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