Gold Silver Reports (GSR) – India is contemplating the next step: it could impose $165.6 million in duties. – Change ‘could’ to ‘would’, and India will launch a modern-day Salt March. Let Indian history inspire this second step. In April 1930, Gandhi led the 240-mile march to protest Britain’s 1882 Salt Act, which barred Indians from manufacturing and selling salt, compelling them to buy this dietary staple from the British, who held a salt monopoly and levied a stiff salt tax that especially hurt India’s poor.
Retaliatory tariffs are lawful civil disobedience built into Article 8:3 of the WTO Agreement on Safeguards. If a WTO member wrongfully imposes a safeguard, then adversely affected members can suspend “substantially equivalent concessions” against that Member.
“Indian tariffs will protest a contemporary injustice as the Salt March protested a colonial one”
With that declaration, India’s can choose its script: another Salt March-like suspension of substantially equivalent concessions.
No More Hugs for Now
If India wants to ensure America First need not mean India Second, then India needs to separate from the embrace with America.
The British Raj was the last great power to tell India who it could trade with, what it could trade, and what its terms of trade would be. America under the Trump Raj is re-visiting history, that it must pay a 25 percent tariff on steel exports, that it must pay a 10 percent tariff on aluminum exports, and that it might soon have to pay a 25 percent tariff on auto and auto-parts exports.
India emerged from the British Raj with a Middle Temple lawyer whom Winston Churchill derided in 1931 as a “half-naked fakir” to lead the Non-Aligned Movement under its founding Prime Minister whom American Secretary of State Dean Acheson derided in 1949 as “one of the most difficult men with whom I have ever had to deal.” –
Yet, Gandhi in the Quit India campaign, and Nehru in the NAM, spearheaded conferences that changed the world.
There is nothing to stop India from re-visiting that history by convening ‘International Trade Round Tables’ to launch pro-development initiatives, address overcapacity in the steel, aluminum, and car industries, discuss linkages to nuclear security issues, and play the ‘China card’ to address Chinese IP theft. Nothing, except India. – Neal Bhai Reports
