Just two days before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leaves for Brazil to attend the IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) Summit, Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh has set off a diplomatic firestorm sending officials scurrying to damage-control, from Brasilia to New Delhi. And prompting Brazil to ask India to make “suitable amends” before the Prime Minister arrives for his meeting with President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva on September 12.

What’s landed New Delhi in this unprecedented embarrassment is an interview Ramesh gave to visiting Brazilian journalist Patricia Campos Mello from the influential Estado do Sao Paulo newspaper last month. In that, Ramesh ridiculed the very idea of IBSA and even questioned bilateral economic co-operation.

“The idea that India and Brazil are natural allies is a little naive,” he is quoted as having said, “we are competitors, we are competing in (the) manufacturing sector...we have contrary interest in agriculture (Brazil is on the rise and India on the defensive) and in services, we want an opening much faster than Brazilians...IBSA will be a powerful bloc in South-South cooperation with echoes of ‘non-alignment’ in earlier times but from the economic point of view, IBSA is little fictitious.’’

(This translation from Portuguese is the version sent to the Prime Minister’s Office by Renu Sharma, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Indian Embassy in Brazil).

Brazilian Foreign and Trade Minister Celso Amorim has let his disappointment be known through the Indian Ambassador to Brazil Hardeep Singh Puri who brought it to the notice of the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday.

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