Overdue ideological turnabout
In January 2004, when the US first published its Next Steps in Strategic Partnership with India, both sides geared up for hectic diplomatic activity that peaked with the visit of US President George W. Bush in early March. The showpiece of the two-year long effort is the agreement on civilian nuclear energy. Hailed as a paradigm shift, the pact is a powerful endorsement by the US that provides for India’s entry into the club of nuclear powers. For its part, India agreed to international safeguards in its civilian nuclear energy programme. In my view, one of the best things about the new relationship is that it finally steers India away from its foolhardy attempt to position itself as a leader of the third world. For one, this position provided no real advantage in the global arena; but worse it bred a ‘third world’ mindset in the ruling class. This victim perspective led to many ridiculous foreign policy postures in which the national interest was often sacrificed at the altar of ideology. The most egregious example of that was non-alignment, in which India stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a tyrannical communist dictatorship against liberal democracies in the US and Western Europe.
On its own, the nuclear deal is not that significant. Currently, India generates less than 3 percent of its power from nuclear sources. If as expected, the civilian nuclear energy programme, helped by the lifting of global sanctions against India, manages to generate 20,000 megawatts of nuclear-based energy by 2025, it still won’t amount to more than 5 percent of the total 350,000 megawatts scheduled to be generated at the time. No, the nuclear deal is significant because of its ideological turnabout. India has clearly declared that it stands with the liberal democracies of the West.
Equally important, the Singh-Bush agreement has another component: agriculture. And thereby hangs a tale. In the 1970s, Indira Gandhi presided over the Green Revolution. Yet a reality which is glossed over is that the research and development which facilitated the green revolution came from an American academy led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, for helping Mexico attain self-sufficiency in wheat production. The green revolution is actually shorthand for the thrust by Indian farmers to increase yields by using Borlaug’s dwarf varieties of wheat and rice. What helped was the extension work provided by the Central government and most important, an agreement to buy their produce at a fixed price.
Around the late 1970s, as more farmers switched to wheat and rice cultivation, market realities began to take over. As suppliers of foodgrains increased, prices faced downward pressure while government was stuck with the fixed price. In the event, the government’s procurement price became a subsidy. As grains piled up in government warehouses, the distribution system began to fail. So the country was faced with a situation where wheat and rice rotted in warehouses even as people went hungry.
In 1982, a committee headed by S.S. Johl, an eminent agronomist, highlighted the ecologically devastating consequences and diminishing returns of the green revolution. Johl suggested that the government encourage farmers to grow value-added crops, including fruits and vegetables. To accomplish that, the government needed to establish a clear road for produce to get from farm to market. This meant not just cold storages and refrigerated transport, but also processing facilities. India is the world’s second largest producer of fruits and vegetables. But 40 percent of its horticulture produce is lost in transit from farm to the market and less than 2 percent is processed. The late Rajiv Gandhi understood this and set up a food processing ministry, but not much happened because it was towards the end of his term as prime minister.
The agricultural agreement with the US will resuscitate this aborted initiative of the late 1980s. India needs the agriculture knowhow to help farmers grow produce that can be processed. This situation is not very different from the embrace by Indian farmers in the late 1960s and early 1970s of the dwarf varieties and various other technological inputs from the US. In the event, we can look forward to what’s been dubbed as the Evergreen Revolution. The new initiative promises to change the agricultural landscape in India as dramatically as the green revolution did. In the event, the spurt of growth in agriculture will transform the economy.A third agreement with the US is related to higher education. An agreement was signed when prime minister Manmohan Singh visited Washington in July 2005, under which a network of 50 Indian universities and institutes of higher learning are being linked to ten top universities in the US including Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley. Moreover, professors from these universities will participate in teaching and research activities in the Indian institutions. The network will be supported by technology giants Microsoft and Qualcomm.
The theme for the new Indo-US relationship could well be: "We’ve only just begun."
(Rajiv Desai is a Delhi-based political commentator and chief executive of Comma)