Obama in Washington. (AP)

Washington, Feb. 10: Indian industry has joined the global corporate mainstream in its first international effort to influence world trade and avoid a trade war.

The invitation to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to participate in this drive by industry bodies in nine nations from Japan to Brazil is an acknowledgement of the new clout of Indian business in the US where Indian and American corporations successfully lobbied the US Congress since 2005 to pass legislation influencing the nuclear deal.

In a strongly-worded letter to Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives and Harry Reid, the leader of majority Democrats in the US Senate, Kiran Pasricha, the Washington-based deputy director-general of the CII and eight of her counterparts asked America’s politicians to “listen to...powerful arguments...from 15 major US business associations, urging you to avoid trade-restrictive mandates in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA),” the legal name for President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package.

Copies of the letter have also been addressed to minority Republican leaders in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives.

The CII’s national counterparts from across the world in this major effort to influence Capitol Hill includes Washington-based operatives of the Brazil Industries Coalition, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the Confederation of British Industry, the Federation of Korean Industries and the Keidanren, otherwise known as the Japan Business Federation.

This effort supports a drive by 15 very powerful business associations in the US to eliminate the “Buy American” clause in Obama’s stimulus package on the ground that it “would undermine the ability of American companies and workers to export goods and services made in the US and thereby undercut the goals of this package.”

Separately, almost all the major US companies with export markets have launched an all-out drive have the “Buy American” provisions scrapped in the ARRA.

More than 100 of these corporations warned in a letter to Pelosi and Reid that “if enacted, these provisions will backfire on the US. They will harm American workers and companies across the entire US economy, undermine US global engagement and result in mirror-image trade restrictions abroad that would put at risk huge amounts of American exports.”

The CII and others provided a strong shot in the arm to this domestic industry drive in the US against protectionism by telling leaders on Capitol Hill that “we are writing to you as the international counterparts of those (domestic US) business associations, working here in (Washington) DC. We commend the stance they have taken, and we hope you will listen to their powerful arguments.”

The letter signed by Pasricha and others pointed out that “each of our organisations is working hard in our home countries, with our domestic governments and constituencies, to make sure they do not make the mistake of thinking that ‘protectionism’ actually protects. We are fighting strongly to keep markets open and to ensure economic activity flourishes as much as possible. In the current climate, with fragile consumer confidence and frozen credit lines, we need as much new opportunity as possible.”

In a thinly-veiled attack on political populism, the letter said that while politicians “must focus on the well-being of their own citizens...political leadership must also have the far-sightedness to work out what is really in their citizens’ best interests, and the commitment to champion those policies.”

The nine global industry business associations said that “our ability to constrain governments around the world from lapsing into isolationism will be much easier if America continues to provide leadership and moral authority on this issue.”

Their letter “strongly urge(d)” Senators and Representatives “to strip from the final language of the bill anything that others could characterise as breaking the promise made at the G20 conference last November (that) ‘we will refrain from raising new barriers to investment or to trade in goods and services, imposing new export restrictions, or implementing WTO inconsistent measures to stimulate exports.’”