The better half

When PM met Hu

When Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee and his delegation land in New Delhi, look at what he will fill up in the SARS form handed out to each arrival. Amongst the questions asked are, whether the traveller has met anyone from a SARS-affected country in the last 15 days. Now that could be a ticklish one, considering that the PM, Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra as well as Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal had a pretty interesting getting-to-know-you half-hour with Chinese President Hu Jintao in St. Petersburg only a few days ago. The PM in fact congratulated him for doing his best to control SARS in a developing nation like China. Hu, as we know, has already ordered the banning of spitting at home. Enterprising Communist party workers are said to be going around their neighbourhoods passing out plastic bags for people to aim their gobs into, among other things. By all accounts, it seems to be working.

Meanwhile, with the PM’s trip to China now being finalised around June 22-26, a SWOT analysis of Comrade Hu seems to have well and truly begun. He is said to be cast much more in the traditional mould of a Communist Party apparatchik, not given to the bombast of either Great Helmsman Mao nor the larger-than-life utterances of the previous President Jiang Zemin. Jiang, as the Financial Times noted, would often break into impromptu renditions of O Sole Mio, singing Chinese opera, speechifying in Russian, reciting the Gettysburg address in English and intoning poetry in Romanian. Hu, in contrast, is very much part of the grey suit-grey tie technocrat genre that runs elite China these days, which includes putting your head down and getting to serious work.

Lesson from Brazil

Amongst Vajpayee’s most interesting meetings through his cross-country tour has been an encounter in Evian with Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. Now Prez Lula has certainly captivated the media by the fact that he practices austerity measures not only on himself — he exercises for 100 minutes every morning and has given up both alcohol and lasagna, losing 7 kg in only 22 days — but also in South America’s largest nation. A former trade unionist who spearheaded a series of car strikes in the 1970s, he is now intent on bringing down rampant inflation as well as high interest rates that is turning the money into paper at home. Lo and behold, pension reform and market-friendly policies are now the order of the day there. Of course, Lula’s own party is furious and has been taking out huge demonstrations in Brasilia. The Prez is unfazed, unveiling a major anti-famine project as well as attempting to streamline growth by entering into talks with industrialists.

Perhaps, the Prime Minister’s men could take a leaf or two out of Lula’s book at home. Here in Evian, Vajpayee’s speech at the G-8 enlarged dialogue has really fallen between two stools. On the one hand the PM has reiterated the need to get rid of trade-distorting subsidies, for example in agriculture that the EU radically promotes, thereby seeming to be on the same side of the US. On the other, he has supported the Tobin tax that calls for a levy on the flow of international capital from rich to poor nations. With such mixed signals abroad, it looks like tough times for economic reform at home, especially in an election year.

The Swiss way

So this is really God’s own country. Absorbing the colours of the sky, the lakes and streams of Switzerland, interspersed with the Alps, have been the inspiration of many a genius. Among them, Graham Greene, buried in a little churchyard in the tiny town of Vevey, and Charlie Chaplin, who lived in Montreux — now the home of a major jazz festival — for many years in his later life. But after decades of being buffeted by the smells of chocolate and cheese and the colour of gold in their infamous banks, the Swiss joined the rest of the UN race last year. Ever since, they have been in the forefront of protests worldwide, whether it’s the unfair policies of the global economic order or Iraq. Both Geneva and Evian have seen a few of those in the last couple of days, although not a patch compared to the pitched battles fought in Seattle. The Swiss still get about 35 per cent of their electricity from nuclear power — nearly 200,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees life here in asylum. In this nation of nearly 6 million people, the MEA has only four ambassadors across the Swiss countryside.