Four former Prime Ministers — V.P. Singh, Deve Gowda, Chandrashekhar and I.K. Gujral are slated to meet PM Vajpayee on Tuesday to express their concerns over India’s position at the forthcoming WTO summit at Cancun, Mexico. The former PMs have serious objections to the government taking any position on issues relating to agriculture, especially since there is no Parliament sanction or sanction from state legislative assemblies despite the fact that agriculture is a state subject. The four former PMs will be accompanied by leaders of Left parties and trade experts. Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley is expected to be present at the meeting. Speaking to The Indian Express V.P. Singh said:‘‘The government should have taken Parliament’s assent to whatever India’s position would be at the WTO round in Cancun. So far the government has failed to implement any of the advantages gained at Doha, hence our position vis-a-vis Cancun is a matter of concern.’’ Singh said India should take a firm stand against the US and EU and clearly say that so long as these countries would subsidise their agricultural produce, India would continue to place quantitative trade barriers like high customs duty. ‘‘So far India has not been able to extract much from the developed countries. It has now got to press that this is the need of the 100 crore people in India, a number the Western world cannot afford to ignore,’’ Singh said. Singh said so far India has taken a stand that as far as issues related to TRIPs are concerned which relate to prices of life saving drugs, the government would make sure these would not be outside the reach of the common people in the country but facts say otherwise. ‘‘Our companies will lose out in drug manufacture or even participating in government procurement orders as they would get no preference over multinational companies. Textiles will also suffer and we have not been able to do much about anti-dumping,’’he said.
