India will decide on RCEP if concerns are addressed: MEA

With the ASEAN inviting India to participate in a meeting on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Indonesia in early February, New Delhi will take a call only if gets indications that its concerns will be considered by others and addressed.

Raveesh Kumar, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), told journalists on Thursday that New Delhi would take a call on returning to the RCEP talks if it gets “an indication” from the other nations participating in the negotiations for the pact that they were “willing to consider some of the issues” which were “of interest to” India.

He was responding to a question on India's view on returning to the negotiations for the RCEP agreement, as it had received an invitation from the secretariat of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to attend the meeting it would hold at Bali in Indonesia on February 3 and 4 to end the impasse caused by New Delhi's decision to withdraw from talks for the pact.

The invitation from the ASEAN came almost nearly three months after New Delhi pulled itself out of the negotiations for the agreement.

The MEA spokesperson also referred to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar's recent remark India had not yet closed its mind on the RCEP.

The 10 ASEAN nations – Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines and Singapore – as well as the six free trade partners of the bloc – India, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea – been negotiating the proposed RCEP agreement since 2012.

If India and all the 15 other negotiating nations sign the RCEP pact, it would create a free trade area, which would have covered 3.6 billion people or the half of the global population and accounted for 39.5 % ($ 49.5 trillion) of the GDP of the world.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, on November 4 last year had announced in Bangkok his government's decision to stay out of the RCEP.

New Delhi had decided to withdraw, primarily because it had anticipated a surge in imports from China to India after implementation of the RCEP and it had been concerned over lack of protection against such a surge. It had suggested that the RCEP agreement should provide for an “auto-trigger mechanism”, which would ensure that the safeguard duties would be automatically imposed when imports from another country would reach a certain threshold. But as the 15 other RCEP negotiating countries had not been able to reach a consensus on New Delhi's proposal, it had announced its decision to stay out of the agreement.

India had also been concerned over lack of protection provided in the draft RCEP agreement against circumvention of the Rules of Origin. It had been anticipating that India’s market could be flooded with the cheap import from a non-RCEP country that might route its goods through a RCEP-country. Besides, India had also not been ready to accept 2014 as the “base year” for bringing down tariff after the RCEP comes into place.