With the widely anticipated re-appointment of Montek Ahluwalia as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission this past weekend, the newgovernments economic team is now fully in place.
The term economic team is widely used in the presidential systems of Latin America. I am, of course, deeply aware of the very different institutional setting of all parliamentary systems, especially our own. As the case of the UK these days demonstrates so graphically, in any parliamentary system ministers are simultaneously policy colleagues and political rivals of the Prime Minister.
The current Indian setting is even more complex, characterised as it is by the separation of political and policy leadership between the Prime Minister and the Congress President.
An additional complication is the challenge of holding a coalition of small regional parties together in ways not really envisaged by the Constitution. These complications have in turn inspired several institutional innovations to supplement the rather beleaguered doctrine of Cabinet responsibility, notably the device of Groups of Ministers and Committees of Secretaries.
Numerous considerations shape the assignment of ministerial portfolios. While these are ultimately driven by the primordial goal of re-election, in reviewing the recent ministerial appointments, one does get the sensethat India is poised to engage more seriously and forcefully on a broadrange of international and regional economic issues.
Ministerial appointments in the finance ministry, the commerce ministry and the ministry of environment and forests, to take some of the salient cases, are characterised by a combination of professionalism and awareness of the political imperatives and opportunities facing the Congress party.
These political imperatives have traditionally been seen as constraints. The considerable challenge facing this Group of Ministers is to help reshape the domestic political discourse so that constructive engagement in international fora is not seen as a sell-out of Indias fundamental interests, but rather as a sign of Indias growing stature in what the Prime Minister is fond of calling the comity of nations.
The three most obvious and prominent global arenas for intensified engagement are the G-20 Leaders meetings; the resumption of the Doha development round in the World Trade Organisation; and the Copenhagen negotiations on climate change at the end of the year.
The G-20 Leaders process is gathering momentum, despite the somewhat unwieldy, arbitrary and unrepresentative composition of the group. Given the scale, spread and depth of the crisis, it is perhaps not surprising that the agenda emerging from the initial meetings of the group (in Washington last November and in London in April) has been rather amorphous and dispersed.
Broadly speaking, though, the mandated work programme has been coalescing around the areas of coordinated economic stimulus; reform of the international financial and regulatory architecture; and monitoring and containing protection.
In previous columns I had argued that India was in fact rather well-placed to make a contribution to these deliberations. Unlike China we have not been a major contributor to global imbalances; even today, by virtue ofrunning a current account deficit, we are helping in a modest