India copy about supporting Bush on climate change

JYOTI MALHOTRA

Berlin, June 6, 2007 : India wants to enter into a long and beautiful relationship with the US on the nuclear deal – but remains coy about supporting George Bush outright on his plans to fix the climate anew for the world.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in Berlin today to represent India in an extended conversation on Friday with the world’s most powerful – and polluting – countries that is the G-8 summit.

Some say the amount of energy the Big-8 will expend in talking about the weather over the next couple of days will result in so much hot air – especially since none of these nations even agree on what to do with the climate outside their air-conditioned rooms.

Clearly, these cynics have the Outreach-5 for company. That unlikely term denotes countries as diverse as India, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, all of whose top leaders are also in Germany to formulate a joint strategy on greenhouse gas emissions.

As for India, the PM seems happy enough to be here, not only because to decline ``such an expensive lunch’’ would be plainly rude, but also because the invitation is a manifestation of India’s growing importance in the world.

In that spirit, India’s top officialdom is certainly not about to disrupt international conferences that believe they are pregnant with meaning. But if you happen to catch a half-smile on the face of Foreign Secretary Shivshanker Menon as he listens to the G-8’s promises on Friday, you will know that India still prefers the UN route.

Officials said India would stick with the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) because it espoused the principle of ``common but differentiated responsibilities.’’ That is, countries with larger greenhouse gas emissions should pay more to fix the problem.

Not that New Delhi will tell Bush what it really thinks about climate change when the PM meets him on the same day, especially since the nuclear deal is a much more immediate agenda on the table.

In fact, officials pointed out that ``there are elements in the Bush strategy that we are comfortable with, such as transfer of clean energy technologies and sharing of intellectual property regimes.’’

Point is, New Delhi instinctively mistrusts Bush’s chosen method of sweeping everything off the table if he doesn’t like it. The US president last week announced that he would call for a 15-nation conference on fixing the climate next year, among whom would be major polluting countries like India and China.

That doesn’t mean that if Bush still manages to put his own climate conference together next year, New Delhi won’t join up. That’s because Foreign Secretary Menon -- who has spent many years in China and clearly admires the Deng Xiaoping school of ``it doesn’t matter what the colour of the cat is, as long as it catches the mice’’ -- believes that it remains important to engage key countries in the world even if you disagree with them.

Traditional Indian behaviour would have snorted at the Bush proposal when it came. But the new New Delhi, instead, wants to keep the good parts and keep quiet about the bad.

The same rules hardly apply to the Europeans, who may be rich, but hardly as powerful. German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have called the PM some days ago in Delhi, hoping that Manmohan Singh would have new proposals on climate change, so that she could have claimed credit for being the first to take the developing countries along.

Instead, Indian officials smile sweetly and point out that India’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions, with 17 per cent of the world’s population, are only 4 per cent of the US, 12 per cent of the EU and 15 per cent of Japan.

Tying itself down to cutting emissions, officials say, will have a definite impact on the current runaway 9 per cent growth at home. Any controls will therefore be built into the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, to impact on areas like mass transport, housing, energy saving technologies etc.

But if the rich and powerful West can help India with access to clean technologies that also save energy – nuclear plants which produce nuclear energy, for example – then New Delhi says it is more than willing to listen.

Clearly, that beginning will be made if Bush agrees with what the PM will tell him about their nuclear deal on Friday.

ENDS