Govt must dump One China policy for more Taiwanese investment

Now that Taiwan is keen to invest in India—it wants Taiwanese companies to double the investments in Tamil Nadu—our government should respond enthusiastically and rationally.

Enthusiastically because not many companies are investing in our country. Captains of industry talk grandly at the myriad investment meets that state governments keep organizing; they make major announcements—which are rarely made good.

Owing to the overbearing officiousness of ministers, bureaucrats, and regulators, not many rich people want to invest in the country. In 2017, for instance, as many as 7,000 ultra-rich Indians left their country for greener pastures abroad. In 2016, the number was 6,000; in 2015, it was 4,000.

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Let alone the private sector, even the public sector is not keen to put in money in India. It was not happening under former prime minister Manmohan Singh; it is not happening now.

Business Standard reported on May 28, “Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her predecessors, including the late Arun Jaitley and P. Chidambaram, have maintained the policy of advising non-financial state-owned companies that if they are not utilizing their cash reserves for capex needs, they should give it to the Centre through dividends or share buybacks.”

On their part, public sector undertakings or PSUs don’t want to invest. A senior government official had told BS, “The mentality in the public sector is that they will be comfortable if they have a lot of cash with them…”

Against this backdrop, the Narendra Modi government has to demonstrate its zeal to attract investment from Taiwan.

Further, the government’s overall behavior vis-à-vis Taiwan should be reasonable. To be precise, it should abandon the abomination called One China policy. As we wrote in an article yesterday, <a href="https://indianarrative.com/world/beijing-wants-indian-media-to-toe-its-line-taiwan-tells-china-to-get-lost-16613.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Beijing wants Indian media to toe its line, Taiwan tells China to ‘get lost’</a>, “Still informed with Nehruvian fantasies and fallacies, it [Indian diplomacy] continues to harm the national interest. The continuation of One China policy is testimony to the dead hand of the past. The upshot of the policy is that we don’t recognize democratic Taiwan as an independent nation but a part of China.”

We, as well most nations of the world, don’t do that because we don’t want to annoy China. Isn’t it outrageous? We appease the world’s biggest and most dangerous rogue nation which is an egregious tyranny and which bullies its neighbors (including India), supports our enemy Pakistan, shields terrorists, carries out genocide against its own minorities, spreads the novel coronavirus, trades in human organs, and in general is a nuisance to the entire world. But we shun a democratic nation that invests in India.

It is time our foreign office mandarins woke up and dumped the One China policy. For the sake of our economy—and for morality..