as pakistani journalist khalid hasan has noticed, India is rapidly gaining global prominence…
India hits it big in world press
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: India seems to be all over the place in the month of June with three of the world’s leading magazines devoting much time and attention to its rise as an economic power.
The latest issue of Time, which will come to newsstands across America on Monday, has a cover story on India, which, under the headline ‘INDIA INC - Why the World’s Biggest Democracy is the Next Great Economic Superpower - and What it Means for America’ carries the picture of a classical Indian dancer wearing a telephone operator’s headset.
The new issue of Foreign Affairs quarterly carries four articles on India. The first by Gurcharan Das is entitled ‘The India Model’, followed by C Raja Mohan’s ‘India and the Balance of Power’, Ashton B Carter’s ‘America’s New Strategic Partner?’ and Sumit Ganguly’s ‘Will Kashmir Stop India’s Rise?’
Earlier this month, The Economist ran a cover story featuring a 14-page special on India captioned ‘Can India Fly?’
Foreign Affairs notes that economic growth and newfound political confidence have together remade India. The once socialist and non-aligned country is now reforming its economy and building strategic partnerships with the world’s great powers. Unlike East Asian countries - Japan, South Korea, and now China - that have grown wealthy by concentrating on low-cost, labour-intensive and export-driven manufacturing industries, India has become one of the world’s most successful economies by concentrating on services and sectors that meet domestic demand.
According to Gurcharan Das, former head of Procter & Gamble India, his country’s progress has raised per capita GDP and lowered poverty rates while insulating the country from volatility in global markets. But complacency and resistance to reforms may yet slow India’s growth and leave hundreds of millions of people without adequate shelter, food, or water. He writes, “Rather than rising with the help of the state, India is in many ways rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the centre of India’s success story. India now boasts highly competitive private companies, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. And since 1991 especially, the Indian state has been gradually moving out of the way - not graciously, but kicked and dragged into implementing economic reforms. It has lowered trade barriers and tax rates, broken state monopolies, unshackled industry, encouraged competition, and opened up to the rest of the world. The pace has been slow, but the reforms are starting to add up.”
The journal points out that during the first decades following India’s independence, New Delhi’s foreign policy aimed to keep India out of the Cold War. Over the past several years, however, rising prosperity combined with a generational shift in India’s leadership and the fall of the Soviet Union have revolutionised India’s foreign policy. According to C Raja Mohan of Indian Express, New Delhi now seeks to be recognised as a “responsible power” with influence not only in its immediate neighbourhood and throughout Asia but also on global issues. Mohan discusses the challenges of India’s new policy direction - particularly whether, during a conflict between China and the United States, India would once again declare itself “non-aligned” or ally with Beijing or Washington. Mohan writes, “After more than a half century of false starts and unrealised potential, India is now emerging as the swing state in the global balance of power. In the coming years, it will have an opportunity to shape outcomes on the most critical issues of the twenty-first century: the construction of Asian stability, the political modernisation of the greater Middle East, and the management of globalisation . . . India is arriving on the world stage as the first large, economic powerful, culturally vibrant, multiethnic, multireligious democracy outside of the geographic West. As it rises, India has the potential to become a leading member of the ‘political West’ and to play a key role in the great political struggles of the next decades. Whether it will, and how soon, depends above all on the readiness of the Western powers to engage India on its own terms.”
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\06\19\story_19-6-2006_pg7_15
