Change agent

India should keep lines open to the Joe Biden camp

The Democratic National Convention, nominally located in Milwaukee but mostly virtual, began on Monday to officially elect Joe Biden, 77, and his part-Indian origin running mate Kamala Harris, 55, as the party’s presidential candidate in this November’s elections. This event represents the business end of a long election cycle when the party platform is formally articulated. Much attention has been focused on Ms Harris and her non-White origins but the policy stances laid out by Mr Biden in recent weeks raise the real prospect of change. Many of the issues he has articulated are standard middle-of-the-road Democrat positions. But they are likely to be consequential because they involve rolling back several Trump administration initiatives.

Domestically, Mr Biden promised to reverse some of Mr Trump’s tax cuts, expand access to health care (again, undoing the Trump administration’s actions), and probably support House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s $3-trillion plan on tackling the recession (approved by the House but blocked in the Senate, where the Democrats will need to win a majority in November). He has also stressed policies for clean energy and electric transport, and returning to the Paris Agreement — all of it based on the belief, questioned by Mr Trump and the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, that climate change is real. The change will not be conflict-free, since shale oil is a big employer. Although he has not spoken much on trade policy, Mr Biden boldly told an interviewer that he would remove the tariffs Mr Trump had imposed on Chinese imports, a statement an aide later modified to “reevaluating tariffs on taking office”, a prospect that suggests an easing of global trade war between the two largest economies. All of these are significant policy changes, and worth noting because of their global implications. 

Of particular interest to India is Mr Biden’s declaration that H1B visas, which Mr Trump has stalled, would have no country limits, and a zero-tolerance policy for cross-border terrorism in South Asia. The question is the Indian government’s stance on a possible Biden victory. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime has invested much diplomatic energy in wooing Mr Trump — from personally greeting his daughter Ivanka in Hyderabad in 2017, to the hand-holding walk at the Howdy Modi event in Houston in September last year to the choreographed Namaste Trump visit to New Delhi this February.

Despite this, even a limited trade agreement eludes both sides, which is understandable, given where the two economies are. Certainly, India would be looking forward to a restoration of the Global System of Preferences, which Mr Trump cancelled. The US might be looking for an investment guarantee agreement but friction points — involving data localisation, the digital tax, and access to the US generics drug market in return for opening up its dairy markets and slashing tariffs on farm goods — have stalled talks for many months. Unless the unique peculiarities of the US electoral system that handed Mr Trump an unlikely victory in 2016 come into play again, it is reasonable to expect Mr Biden to take the oath of office in January 2021, given his handsome lead in the polls. It is to be hoped that the Indian diplomatic establishment has kept the lines open to the Democratic nominee’s camp.