Over the top

With the World Cup on, a large part of the planet is strutting around with a bloated sense of national pride. Barring certain traditional European football powers who left in ignominious defeat, even the countries already out of the tournament take a certain satisfaction in having got this far at all, and many of those whose teams never stood a real chance in the tournament now swap national allegiance for regional pride. Take Ghana, for example,  which as the only African team still in the tournament now carries the hefty expectations of that entire continent. And in the midst of it all us, when it comes to national or regional pride, Southasians are left feeling a bit left out.

Not to say we don’t have our loyalties. Head to a bar and you’ll see fans of all the traditional powers sporting Chinese knock-offs of their team’s jerseys, celebrating or cursing as and when appropriate. Our allegiances, however, tend to be fickle, and with little to restrict us, we often  throw our weight behind whoever we feel has the best shot at winning, or even whatever team has the most attractive striker. Southasian teams have never so much as come close to qualifying for the World Cup, and considering where are teams stand now, it will be long time before we ever do. Just to illustrate the point, I remember Nepal taking on Saudi Arabia in a qualifier that, if memory serves me right, ended about 21-0 in favor of the Saudis. Now before the non-Nepalis among you launch into chuckles at that sad result, I advise you to take a sobering look at your own country’s qualifying record. Even if Southasia did have a contender from the region, given the history of bitter sport rivalries we carefully cultivate on our cricket grounds, I doubt we could ever really find a footballing champion among the regions’ nations.

Despite the grim scenario, though, we continue to love our football. True, we might not be as fanatic as the South Americans, but many of us play it in our schools, follow the European leagues, and patiently clue our non-fanatic friends in on the latest news come World Cup time. That our passion perseveres just goes to show that we really do love the game. Which is why it’s always uplifting to be reminded that Southasian football does matter, even if in small ways.

I recently stumbled across a little gem of a documentary, The Other Final, about a football match between Bhutan and Montserrat, played to coincide with the 2002 World Cup final. While Ronaldo and Co. dismantled the Germans in Yokohama, the world’s two lowest ranked teams kicked off to play for recognition as not the world’s worst. If, like me, you’re a bit jaded with this World Cup, where the football often takes a back seat to the bombardment of marketing and various players valued in the millions seem content to while 90 minutes away aimlessly slotting the ball around midfield, the documentary serves as a reminder of what makes the sport beautiful. The documentary can get a bit cheesy with its take on how sport can bridge cultures, but that really is the most important point of it all. Other than their football records, you couldn’t pick two more disparate nations if you tried. Mountainous little Bhutan meets Montserrat, which, as I found out from the documentary, is an absolutely tiny island in the Caribbean. Here are two countries that in essence didn’t even know the other existed, coming together for a passionate game of football. I won’t give the result away, since you can watch if all for yourself. Below is a link to the first part of the film on Youtube, and from there you can follow the links in the sidebar to work your way through the rest of it.

It’s a great testament to the beauty of football, and a reminder to Southasians that despite being a long way from the sport’s highest echelons, our football is still me meaningful and inspiring. If you happen to be among the people still baffled at why the world takes a silly game so seriously, this just might show you.

By Roman Gautam

Earlier this month India turned to the WTO to resolve its latest quarrel with Europe’s pharmaceutical giants, filing a complaint over seizures of generic Indian drugs transiting through Europe. The two seizures sparking this flare-up, one in Paris and the other in Berlin in 2009, are only the latest in a much longer list of similar seizures. The EU acted after European firms complained that the drugs in question violated European patents, thus allowing them to be ‘detained’ under current European customs law. India insists that EU customs regulations, including reforms promised recently in an effort to diffuse the current dispute, remain in violation of WTO trade rules.  After India made some painful concessions to join the WTO, it is time for the WTO to defend India from European pharmaceuticals’ bullying.

India’s thriving pharmaceutical industry is the result of laws enacted in the 1970s that allowed companies to disregard foreign patents, reverse engineer the latest drugs, and pump out high quality generic versions that cost a fraction of the originals. When India joined the WTO in 1995, it, just as every other signatory, accepted the WTO agreement on TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). The agreement gave India until 2005 to adopt and enforce legislature respecting foreign pharmaceutical patents registered in the country, which effectively put a squeeze on generic manufacturing that led to very sizeable losses of jobs and revenue.

The idea behind the WTO is that the necessary concessions to join gain members certain protections. Among these is the free transit of goods, which the EU’s seizures clearly violate. As per current WTO rules, regardless of the drugs’ legal status in Europe, Europe must allow their free transit so long as they do not violate patents registered in either the country of origin or destination. By that criteria, these shipments, bound for various African and Latin American nations, are entirely legitimate.

Taking a broader view of the issue, the WTO must defend India unless it is to appear the corporations’ lapdog, which has been a persistent and valid critique of its TRIPS enforcement in the smaller economies. The WTO’s critics point out that a look at the winners and losers of patent enforcement leaves no doubt as to whose interests TRIPS serves. Indian pharmaceuticals’ loss has meant large European and American pharmaceuticals gain, allowing them a monopoly on vital drugs such as anti-retrovirals, which they now price out of the range of the world’s poorer nations. Yes, there is a strong argument for enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights in order to promote innovation, but how long can the WTO continue to promote corporate profit without regard to global public health?

And on that count, the EU’s current actions cannot help but raise eyebrows considering Europe’s substantial commitments, both vocal and financial, in support of global health and development. The current WTO dispute will test if the EU can stand by its word in the face of pressure from big business. The fact that the EU has legal loopholes allowing seizures in violation of WTO rules while its own firms are among the loudest advocates pushing for enforcement of WTO standards in India should serve as an embarrassment. The EU has work to do putting its own house right before turning its attention elsewhere. And the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. Swiss pharma giants such as Novartis are quick to push for seizures of generic drugs, conveniently forgetting that Switzerland’s strong pharmaceutical industry is itself the result of past  protectionism and disregard for IP rights. India has every right to challenge EU efforts to prevent it from protecting its emergent industries the way European nations have done in the past. Even today, Europe persists with hugely controversial agricultural subsidies while simultaneously condemning protectionism in the world’s emerging economies.

The current dispute also goes beyond relations between India and the EU. Brazil simultaneously filed a WTO complaint over the seized shipments, both because it was to receive some of the seized meds and because it’s nascent pharmaceutical industry faces the same IP issues as India’s. Public health advocates see this as an ongoing battle to ensure affordable access to medication for the world’s poor. Slick marketing aside, big-pharma has done shamefully little to ensure its products get to those who most need them. Recent efforts to confuse the issues of counterfeit medication and generic drug manufacture ahead of important global summits addressing counterfeiting are the latest addition to that particular list of shame. Granted, counterfeit medication is a major problem for which India bears some blame, but the issue has nothing to do with legitimate companies producing high quality generic drugs. Still, pharmaceutical multinationals continue to conflate counterfeiting and patent issues in order to cloak IP concerns in the rhetoric of public good.

As for the WTO dispute itself, the EU now has two months to open consultations with India and Brazil to search for a mutually agreed settlement, barring which India and Brazil can convey a WTO panel to rule on alleged EU violations, a long and involved process that will drag on for at least a year. Seeing as how India has already rejected the EU’s first proposals at regulatory reform, the issue seems set to make many more headlines.

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Additional background and reading:

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/india-brazil-drag-eu-to-wto/394686/

http://www.newsweek.com/id/55743/page/1

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/05/12/counterfeit-medicines-in-wto-dispute-process-heating-up-at-who/

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr120h.htm

by Roman Gautam

WTO, ASEAN, OECD, NAFTA, OPEC, SAARC, G8, G20…

With India getting ever bolder on the economic stage, the letter ‘I’ has been popping up in quite a few of the newer acronyms to float to the top of the alphabet soup of geopolitics. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), and even the initial rumblings of BASIC (Brazil, ummm… Africa South, India and China). Beyond the high profile conferences and presidential photo-ops however, it is worth considering what India really stands to gain from her new alliances, and whether these groupings of vastly different nations are cohesive enough to last.

BRIC, the most prominent of the bunch, was the brainchild of a Goldman Sachs economist writing on emerging economies back in 2001. I still hold CRIB would have been more suitable (emerging economies, right?), not to mention far more conducive to cheap puns in the blogosphere (as it stands, BRIC-a-brac is about as far as anyone has been able to go),  but presumably BRIC, much more suggestive of force and stability, was an easier sell for investment fund managers. That, after all, seems to have been the primary purpose of the grouping in its early days as investment banks touted BRIC funds for those interested in buying into emerging markets. Quite a nifty marketing ploy really, since it meant risky investments like those in oil price dependent Russia could be bundled into a palatable package. Recently, after the Russian economy took a serious hiding in the global financial crisis while Brazil, India and China emerged relatively unscathed, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the BRIC economies have come under serious scrutiny, and suddenly the BRIC group doesn’t look quite as logical an alliance as it once did. “We are four large countries with abundant resources, large populations and diverse societies,” was about as much common ground as Manmohan Singh could point to at the recent BRIC conference. True, but under those criteria, there is a very long list of other nations that should be invited to the party.

That has been a common critique of the BRIC since its inception, with questions over why, among others,  growing economies such as Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa weren’t included. With all the aforementioned three keen to join and Russia’s ‘emerging’ economy now steadily shrinking, there is a strong argument for reconfiguration.

Even in its present configuration, the BRIC group hasn’t been much of a success as an economic bloc. The vastly different economies of the four members have kept the group from formulating any collective economic agenda. One striking example of how these nations’ interests fail to line up, consider the question of oil prices. India and China would benefit from cheap petroleum to feed their growth, while Russia and Brazil, which recently discovered vast new off-shore reserves, would want to see that price high. Disparate economic agendas also mean the BRICs cannot find definite mechanisms through which to flex their collective muscle on the global economy, which has never been a problem for more natural economic collectives such as OPEC(Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). The only common policy point so far has been the proposal of a collective shift away from US treasury bonds in favor of IMF bonds in order to decrease dependency on the US dollar. This, though, promises to remain little more than a vague idea for the near future as with all the BRICs, and most significantly China, holding large foreign currency reserves in US dollars, any such move would amount to the BRICs shooting themselves in the foot.

Still, when it comes to one-on-one deals between individual member states, the BRICs do have a lot to offer each other. India specifically has a lot to gain. A recently signed nuclear deal with Russia promises 16 nuclear power plants. Acquisitions and partnerships in Brazil are a foot in the door for Indian IT and telecom looking to expand into the Latin American market. Indian petroleum firms that have in the past been crowded out of participation in new oil fields have been granted access to exploit Brazil’s newfound oil. Such deals, though, can and have been cut on a state-to-state basis and without any involvement of the BRICs as a collective.

On the diplomatic front, the partnership shows more promise, but here again the BRIC collective appears too restrictive. At the Copenhagen Climate Conference, the emergent economies (a.k.a. emergent polluters) banded together to make it clear that they would not accept any deal . In this case, the grouping was Brazil, South Africa, India and China (give that alphabet soup another good swirl, and here we get the BASIC bloc), necessarily breaking the BRIC configuration since Russia’s climate interests do not quite line up with the other partners’. Here too, it would seem logical to expand the BASICs to include nations such as Indonesia who have similar interests on the issue.

South Africa in particular is getting increasingly prominent in all of this, prompting the creation of IBSA (BASIC minus China). This seems a more natural grouping on interest, since at the three states do have more in common than the BRICs. All three share democratic forms of government, and do face a number of common challenges, especially on the social front where all three must tackle poverty and socioeconomic inequality. But again, it’s a new group with as yet no clearly formulated collective goals, and it remains to be seen what the group can do besides drafting joint press releases.

Coming back to the BRICs, the one thing big diplomatic concession India has gained from the collective is support her long frustrated claim to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Whether the group’s stated support can be translated to actual diplomatic leverage in the UN in the near future will be a test of the BRICs capacity for collective action.

For now, the BRICs appear not so much a group for economic cooperation, but a mustering of collective diplomatic clout. Despite the lack of collective goals, each nation, and India certainly not the least of them, stands to gain certain advantages. Each of the nations hefts a big diplomatic club, and four clubs swinging around with at least sometimes a semblance of collective purpose does make you pretty hard to ignore. So the BRIC collective will persist for now, if for nothing else but to ensure that the world can no longer ignore these nations.

Beyond that, with no common economic agenda as with OPEC, no common military enemy as with NATO, and no permanent collective interests, BRIC doesn’t seem to be a lasting configuration. Each nation will continues to enjoy particular benefits from the friendship, but as individual states continue to maneuver for advantage new alliances will form. India’s diplomats seem well aware of that fact, and have remained very crafty and flexible as the nation gradually moves up to a higher international plane. India’s place among the new order of emergent powers is guaranteed, but with no shortage of other pretenders, the alphabet soup will keep swirling.

LINKS

For further reading, some of the better analysis and opinion on the topic currently out there:

The Trillion Dollar Club (The Economist): http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15912964

In Brazil, will BRIC summit unify or reinforce their rifts?(Christian Science Monitor): http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/2010/0415/In-Brazil-will-BRIC-summit-unify-or-reinforce-their-rifts/(page)/2

Power Up: BRICs Overtake G7 by 2027 (Newsweek): http://www.newsweek.com/id/190387/page/1

Roman Gautam wrote a recent web exclusive, Romancing India, about a Brazilian soap opera set in India.  In this post, he writes some background about the series:

After all the recent coverage of BRIC and IBSA, here’s a side of Brazil-India relations that hasn’t been getting much attention.

The clip above, the opening theme to Caminho das Índias, rolled across Brazilian TV screens over 200 times last year, six days a week at 8pm. Caminho is the latest hit novela (soap opera) from TV Globo, by far Brazil’s most famous and popular novella producer and in no small part responsible for making TV soaps the global phenomenon they are today. Even by Globo’s lofty standards, the series was a huge success. Just to give you an idea, the grand finale is estimated to have had over 90% viewership among Globo’s 120 million viewers.

It’s a tricky title to translate. The closest literal translation would be something along the lines of “The Way of the Indies,” but “The Road to India” probably gets closer to the gist of it. The official English title for the series does away with all ambiguity and bluntly states India: A Love Story. Hardly elegant, but it gets the point across.

Considering the novela’s plot, India: A Love Story seems a gross oversimplification. One love story could never keep Brazil’s novela-crazed millions satiated for eight months, so Caminho has a very sizable number of romances. The main one pits true love against the caste system when Bahuan, a Dalit adopted into a Brahmin family, who falls in love with Maya, a beautiful Brahmin girl who works, of all places, in a call center (not to stereotype, I’m sure!). Maya’s family is scandalized, but their forbidden love perseveres and eventually prevails (I don’t mean to spoil it for anyone, but that particular detail seems predictable enough to disclose). Meanwhile Raj, whose family had already arranged his marriage to Maya, falls for a Brazilian woman whose attempts to unravel the complexities of Indian social custom throw up a whole new raft of complexities. Add to that an army of subsidiary characters with their own loves and dreams, a stubborn rivalry between Raj’s conservative Brahmin family and Bahuan’s liberal adopted father, and myriad eccentric aunts and kindly grandparents, and you’re staring at a daunting climb before the denouement.

To get you started, here’s a clip of the opening scene of the first episode. Keep an ear out for “dekho,” “chalo,” “bhagwaan ke liye,” and other snippets of Hindi.

It’s not too difficult to follow with a little help, so let me quickly walk you through it. The montage of Varanasi plays to the sound of Raul Seixas, Brazil’s favorite 70s hippie rockstar, singing “I was born 10,000 years ago” accompanied by a little sitar and tabla. Shankar (of the white beard) prays in the Ganga, begging to be absolved of his sins. Enter Opash with his two sons, to whom he recounts a creation myth of the sacred river. Young Raj wonders aside and reaches out in curiosity to touch Bahuan’s necklace. Opash furiously pulls his son aside and scolds him for touching a Dalit. Shankar comes to the aid of the hapless Bahuan, telling Opash, quite pointedly, to shut up. They argue, with Shankar insisting, “Bhagwaan ke liye,” that all are equal and no one is untouchable, while Shankar, indignant, refuses to accept that any untouchable as his equal, “Haare baba!” Opash takes his sons to the river to purify them, where they receive a crash course in how Brahma created four castes of people. In response to his inquisitive son Raj, Opash reminds his son that Dalits are not children of Brahma, but merely  the dust beneath Brahma’s feet, meant for impure work and thus untouchable. Meanwhile on the riverbank Shankar tells Bahuan not to believe a thing Opash says. He asks the boy his name and where he lives. Bahuan tells the story of how his parents were burned alive for drinking from the well of their high caste landlord. Shankar is touched, confesses that he is childless, and decides to adopt the poor orphan. At Shankar’s prompting Bahuan calls him father, to the old man’s obvious joy. A procession carrying a statue of Lord Ganesh walks past at just that moment, which Shankar takes as a sign of an auspicious new beginning. Cue the flying flower petals.

And all that, let me emphasize, in just the first seven minutes.

As you can see, the producers really did their research. Sizeable parts of the novela were shot on location, the Brazilian cast could easily pass for Indians by their appearance, and the art direction is quite accurate (though to Southasian eyes it looks like they’re all, inexplicably, always dressed for a wedding).  For further proof, here’s another clip, this time of the Brazilian cast trying their hand at Bollywood dancing.

The good news for the curious is that the series is up on youtube in its entirety, all 203 episodes split into 10 minute chunks. The bad news is none of it is subtitled. For any Portuguese speaking Goans out there it should make sense once you tune into the accent, but otherwise you will have to wait. Rest assured, though, that TV Globo is working on it, and that their very capable global distribution machine will soon get Caminho das Índias to a TV set near you.

Here in Brazil, even now that it’s been replaced on air by another novela, there is no escaping the influence of Caminho das Índias. As Brazil’s first look at the region, the novela has shaped the way Brazilians see not just India, but all of Southasia. Here’s more on that for those interested : <http://himalmag.com/Romancing-India_fnw36.html> To understand how much of an impact the novella has had, it’s worth emphasizing that TV in Brazil is much more influential than it is in Southasia. In many ways, the tele-novela is to Brazil what Bollywood is to India. This is Brazil’s popular entertainment, and Brazilians take to it with the same passion Southasian audiences bring to the cinema. Cinema is not very popular in Brazil, where, unlike in Southasia, theatres are limited and ticket prices still inaccessible to the poor. TVs, on the other hand, are everywhere, and even the poorest households will often buy a TV set though they can barely put food on the table. With TV Globo beaming free in every part of Brazil, its novelas reach literally every corner of the country. With these novelas running almost every day for many months, Brazilian audiences have a very long time to absorb them. Given all of this, the novela’s power is hardly surprising.

In the wake of the novela, it’s a great time to get Brazil better acquainted with Southasia. TV Globo set off a similar phenomenon a couple of years ago when O Clone (The Clone), a novella set in Morocco created a rage for all things Arab or Middle Eastern. A few years down the line, that interest has almost completely died out, with nothing to show for all the hype. With business and diplomatic ties between the two regions so in vogue at the moment with the focus on BRIC and IBSA, here’s hoping Southasia can do better with its chance.

Roman Gautam is a Kathmanduite currently residing in Rio de Janeiro. He still doesn’t quite understand how he got there. To read the web exclusive Romancing India, click here.