President Advises Cautious Liberalisation

President K R Narayanan yesterday expressed his backing for liberalisation, saying that "we have moved to a stage of partial maturity of the economy, when we needed new forms of management, new forms of expression of the spirit of enterprise."

However, he added the caution that, "in a vast country, with millions of people and poverty rampant, we cannot liberalise recklessly, in such a way that the balance of the society is upset and, while some sections would flourish, make profits, the rest of the people would be left without employment and be helpless."

In an interview with Frontline editor N Ram, telecast on the eve of the 51st anniversary of India's independence from British rule, Narayanan said it had "helped us" to have liberalised cautiously, more slowly in some sectors than in others.

 

The President, a former student at the London School of Economics, held that "economic liberalisation is a world phenomenon. Socialist countries, capitalist countries, all of them, have to take to liberalisation. You know the liberalisation took place first in Britain, then in the United States under President Reagan. These were not liberalising from a socialist system. It think it is because of the stage of economy which the world has reached at present and the stage of technology."

He, however warned that "there are many serious political scientists who have argued that the age of sovereignty is over. They want a frontierless, borderless world, and that is a very dangerous philosophy which may suit the most developed and powerful countries of the world and not those who are small and developing."

He also warned that "many of the developed countries are, though they have signed the WTO, ...not practicing it; anti-dumping measures they are adopting very liberally, as also tariff, non-tariff barriers. So we have to carefully argue within the WTO system our case."

The President held that "there are forces working against the emergence of India as a big factor in Asia. We have to face that problem also." He said that nuclear weapons should be abolished but "not in parts but wholly" and could be a deterrent power. He argued that India's recent tests "gave a very salutary shock to the complacency of the great powers and the world opinion, which was moulded by them." Both India and Pakistan would now feel "the inescapable need to settle the differences between them peacefully and through negotiations," he added.

On politics, Narayanan held that "communal mobilisation in the long run will not succeed in India because Indian society cannot be mobilised communally. Even the last elections have shown that communities, religious communities, castes, did not vote solidly for one party."

The President held that India "represents the world in miniature. If a system can succeed in India, it will indicate the possibility of such success in the world as a whole." About the success of India's democracy, he said: "I don't think that we can rest on our oars in the maintenance of democracy. Critical times are facing us. There are, there will be crisis, that we will have to face."

India's first President from a Dalit community held that "our inherited caste system remains with us but it has been very badly battered ...by policies, by the march of technology and economics." He noted that there was "some sort of counter-revolution resisting it, but the overwhelming force of the progressive movement has been winning by and large."