Tough ride ahead?

Chicago, Feb. 17: Ahead of next week’s budget, India is being nudged here to embrace a symbol of globalisation and highway snobbery by allowing easy passage to Harley Davidson motorcycles on the country’s roads.

If commerce minister Kamal Nath, who is beginning two days of intense talks with the Americans on Tuesday, thought he had got rid of US harangues on market restrictions for the iconic symbol of bike culture last year, he will find in Chicago that he could not have been more wrong.

In 2007, India rectified its bizarre rules that prevented Harley Davidsons from being sold in India as the bike manufacturer did not conform to the country’s emission standards.

Every time Indian and US officials met to discuss commerce since President Bill Clinton’s visit to Delhi in 2000, the Americans cited restrictions on the “hog”, a popular nickname here for Harleys, as a prime example of the difficulties in advancing trade with India.

The Indians always retaliated by narrating their 18-year efforts to get permission to export mangoes to the US.

The troubles ultimately reached the summit between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush when they met at the White House in July 2005.

Intense efforts in 2005 and the following year cleared the way for the highly-publicised entry of Indian mangoes into US groceries. Delhi, in turn, allowed almonds from the US. The complaints about the “hogs”, however, continued to cloud Indo-US business talks.

Harley Davidson executives went to Delhi and made a case that high engine-capacity motorcycles could not be expected to fit into India’s emission standards that applied to two-wheelers of 500cc or lower. They pleaded that US standards for 228cc engine bikes, which are classified as highway motorcycles, be adopted by India as well.

Finally, in April last year, Delhi agreed that as long as “hogs” sent to India met Euro III emission standards, they could enter the market. But the Milwaukee-based motorcycle manufacturer continued to put its plans for India on hold. With import duties and taxes crossing 90 per cent, it did not think Harley Davidsons would be viable in the Indian market.

So, the effort now in Chicago and at other similar bilateral meetings will be to reduce the tariffs in the new budget. Officials in Delhi said finance minister P. Chidambaram is, however, unlikely to consider such a request favourably.

But what would the Left parties, which are crying foul about the Indo-US nuclear deal, think of this effort by another capitalist icon to roar through highways in Bengal and Kerala?

The motorcycle-maker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has a publicity weapon the Left parties will find hard to evade or counter.

Two years ago, Vietnam agreed to lower import duties on bikes with 650cc engine capacity and above by — yes — as much as 60 per cent in a phased manner. And Harley Davidson was allowed to open a dealership in Beijing in 2006: a “hog” sells there at 10 times the annual income of a Chinese. Beijingers have to shell out, in addition, the equivalent of $2,000 for a special permit if they want to ride a high engine-capacity bike in the centre of the Chinese capital.