by P. SAINATH
In 1990, Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only woman on the board at Wal-Mart, a company based in Arkansas, where she was first lady. PHOTO/Richard Berquist/The New York Times
Foreign direct investment in retail may be on hold, but Hillary Clinton can stop worrying about Anand Sharma and Pranab Mukherjee.
“How does (Commerce Minister) Sharma view India’s current Foreign Direct Investment guidelines? Which sectors does he plan to open further? Why is he reluctant to open multi-brand retail?” Those were among the questions U.S. Secretary of State Clinton posed in a (Wiki released) cable to her embassy in New Delhi in September 2009, some months after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh began his second term.
Note her pointed query on opening up ‘multi-brand retail.’ She had other worries, too. “Why was (Pranab) Mukherjee chosen for the finance portfolio over Montek Singh Ahluwalia? How do Mukherjee and Ahluwalia get along?” And “does Sharma get along with Mukherjee and Prime Minister Singh?” They get along fine, Hillary, and they’re all in it together, as a team.
Hillary has reason to be concerned about Foreign Direct Investment in retail. There’s the tens of thousands of dollars she earned from serving as a director on Walmart’s board. And the other thousands of dollars contributed to her 2007-08 campaign by Walmart executives and lobbyists. An ABC News report on that in 2008 also observed that as a director, Hillary Clinton remained “a loyal company woman” (Clinton remained silent as Wal-Mart fought unions: ABC News, January 31, 2008).
And she surely knows the UPA’s FDI retreat is tactical.
[The United Progressive Alliance – UPA – is a ruling coalition of center-left political parties heading the government of India.] Pranab Mukherjee put it with disarming candor: we don’t want mid-term polls. Hillary too had flip-flopped during her election campaign, going by the ABC News report. (While on its Board of Directors, she had said: “I’m always proud of Walmart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else” — June 1990.)
Yet, Hillary’s campaign website of 2007-08, the ABC News report points out, omitted “any reference to her role at Walmart in its detailed biography of her.” As the race heated up, she recanted: “Now I know that Walmart’s policies do not reflect the best way of doing business and the values that I think are important in America.”
Perhaps Hillary’s FDI concerns are loftier. She must be worried about the poor Indian farmer. The wonderful thing about the FDI-in-retail debate is the explosion of concern for agriculturists. Never have struggling Indian farmers found so many champions. They’ve been crawling out of the woodwork ever since the FDI announcement. From Deepak Parekh to Ratan Tata, they’ve suffered sleepless nights, agonizing over the small farmer.
They might want to take a look at the American farm population. At their family farms, especially smaller ones, wrecked by corporate monopolies at every level, from giant agri-businesses to mammoth retail chains. Presently less than one million Americans claim farming as their occupation. That figure was over 25 million in the 1950s.
With what credibility does our regime, on whose watch farm suicides crossed the quarter-of-a-million mark, speak of helping farmers? Who knows what windfalls the deals struck with retail giants have brought to individuals in this most corrupt government in our history? We need to embrace that old journalistic principle: Follow the money. (Hillary does, though in a very different way.) Meanwhile, look at our government’s claims.
Who it affects
Doing away with the ‘middleman’: The first to be devastated will be that poor ‘middlewoman’ — the vendor who daily provides our towns and cities with fresh produce. She did not push up the prices and has her modest margin squeezed each time they rise. That woman carrying that huge basket to your doorstep, on her feet 14-16 hours a day to feed her family. She’s the first ‘middleman’ target.
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