Port of doubt

The United States has always been the leader of global trends, mainly of the conspicuous consumption kind.

The United States has always been the leader of global trends, mainly of the conspicuous consumption kind. It could well be setting off a global trend now in xenophobia over who runs its ports. The cloud of fear that came from the US over the Dubai Port World seems now to have shifted to India. Shipping company officials are claiming that they are worried about the security and monopoly aspects of the deal. The fears, almost always expressed anonymously, are more likely to be based on business interests, rather than the interests of the country’s well- being. While much was made in the US of the fact that the government of Dubai- owned DPW, the reality is that many big port operators in the US are also State-owned such as the China Shipping in the Port of Los Angeles and APL (owned by Singapore’s State-owned NOL) in Oakland. It may seem less than fair to ask whether the fears were triggered off by the belief that the UAE would somehow introduce al-Qaeda terrorists into the US. But the frank answer is that those who opposed the deal virtually implied so.

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The issue of container security is an important element of protection against international terrorism, but it is not likely to be resolved by raising fears about the geographic origins of ownership. The issues are quite straightforward — companies like DPW or Huawei, the Chinese IT company about whom scare stories have appeared periodically in the media, may be foreign-owned, but they will operate on Indian soil, under Indian laws and be monitored by Indian regulators. Presumably they will also operate under the eye of Indian security agencies. If those agencies are unsure about their abilities of surveillance of the said companies, they should say so. The government should feel free to dismantle these and replace them with newer entities who will be up to the task, instead of taking recourse to spreading a needless sense of helplessness.

In international business, as in diplomacy, reciprocity is a pretty good guiding principle. Whether it is tariff barriers, or opening up an economy for investment, governments insist on level playing fields and seek out ways and means of promoting mutual gain. Shared interests and fortunes are the better guarantors of security than an ambience of paranoid suspicion and hostility.