Menacing US diplomacy

There is something that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has in common with US diplomats—or at least the intellectual property (IP) attachés posted at various diplomatic missions: a dislike of NGOs. Both, the leader of the world’s most populous democracy and the diplomats of the most powerful democracy, make no bones about the fact that they find NGOs a stumbling block in implementing their various agendas.

“There are NGOs, often funded from the US and the Scandinavian countries, which are not fully appreciative of the development challenges that our country faces,” Singh said in an interview published in Science in February last year. He was bewailing the campaign by food and agriculture activists against GM crops and by other groups against nuclear power. In Geneva recently, US diplomats were railing against the same class but for trying to weaken the IP or patent regime. At the annual conference of American IP attachés organised by the powerful US Chamber of Commerce, these officials were in full cry against NGOs, specially those operating at WTO and other UN agencies, for misleading their governments about the costs imposed by the IP regime favoured by the US.

IP attachés? That’s the new breed of diplomats that Washington has been posting at its key embassies to ramp up IP awareness and ensure that developed countries fall in line on its maximalist IP agenda. India has been hosting one such since 2006, an official of the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) who functions as First Secretary (IP) at the US embassy in Delhi.