For Prosperity and Power

The US delegation to the People's Republic of China affirms the obvious: the interest of big business is the national interest. The United States understands this and deploys its imperial might to promote its corporations. Here, it has come to negotiate with its greatest challenger in order to secure a smoother field of operation for them. I do not intend to criticise this reality, but to highlight what prudence demands.

A nation must ease the conditions of doing business at home to the optimum extent and promote its corporations' operations abroad. That is the path towards the intertwined goals of prosperity and power. At the next level, it must ensure that power and wealth remain fairly distributed within the country. The national ecosystem should enable widely held shareholder companies and cooperatives to rise into global corporations. It is fundamentally about the rule of law and fair, facilitative rules of the game.

Simultaneously, insofar as their rules permit, Indians must raise, and be allowed to raise, their stake in the shareholding of global companies to feasible and safe limits, and benefit from the operations of multinational giants.

Niraj Kumar Jha