View: India’s ‘no’ at WTO may just mean ‘not yet’
trade ministers gather at the World Trade Organization summit in Abu Dhabi this week, one of the villains will, as usual, be India. And, certainly, there’s some justice to the complaint that Indian negotiators are far too ready to block consensus at such confabs unless granted concessions on their own priorities. Saying “no” often comes too easily to them.
But those priorities need to be viewed in the context of India’s fiendishly complicated domestic politics. This is a country the size of a continent, and achieving internal consensus on a drastic shift in policy is as hard — or harder — than getting agreement at the WTO.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the strongest, and most popular, leader India has had in decades. But he has always been particularly careful not to provoke widespread protests against his decisions. Although he hates to retract policies after investing political capital in them, he has twice in the past decade withdrawn legislation that enraged some of India’s farmers — a law early on in his tenure that would have made it easier to acquire agricultural land for industry, and a package of reforms in 2021 meant to liberalize India’s complicated farm subsidy system.
India’s welfare state, as so many others, is not set up for modern concerns and problems. It induces rent-seeking, and that can hold New Delhi back when it comes to making international commitments. Agriculture — one of India’s most unreformed, unproductive and politically sensitive sectors, on which a majority of Indians continue to
