Pranab wears a diplomatic hat on FDI
When Mr Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday said that India’s foreign direct investment policy was not country-specific, indicating thereby that there was no such ban against Chinese companies investing in India, he was holding forth in his capacity as In...
By TNN |
NEW DELHI: When Mr Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday said that India’s foreign direct investment policy was not country-specific, indicating thereby that there was no such ban against Chinese companies investing in India, he was holding forth in his capacity as India’s external affairs minister.
His views on the subject might have been somewhat differently articulated were he still the country’s defence minister. As the bureaucratic adage goes, ministers come and go, but what ministries think do not.
It could be argued that the defence ministry under Mr Mukherjee then was making the same argument that the new external affairs minister is now making — keep Chinese foreign direct investment out of key sectors — and implying that restriction should be sector-specific and hence, by implication, not country-specific.
However, the ministry’s opposition to the Chinese bid for developing the Vizhinjam port in Kerala and its comments about the need to keep out Chinese FDI in a National Security Council discussion paper bring out the stark difference between the viewpoints of the two ministries in question.
The NSC discussion paper, which sought application of stricter norms for FDI in order to address some pressing security concerns, recorded the defence ministry’s reservations against allowing access to Chinese companies to such ports that are of strategic importance by nature to the country.
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The same paper had the MEA demanding that there should be a rational basis for keeping out FDI which, according to it, should be globally applicable rather than targeting a specific country. It argued that discrimination can have its repercussions.What Mr Mukherjee expressed on Wednesday by saying that “we are inviting everybody (to invest in India)” and that “our policy is not related to any country specifically” was in the same vein as his ministry’s stand put out in the NSC paper.
In a statement that should have pleased the Left, Mr Mukherjee also said that just because one Chinese company was stopped from investing in India, it did not connote that all companies from that country would be denied access. He even sought to downplay the controversy arising out of the NSC’s recommendation.
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