India
Editor, Bruce P. Corrie, PhD

A recent volume of The International Policy Review presents an approach to understand the complexity and diversity of India as it approaches the new millennium. Scholars and practitioners, policy makers and individuals, domestic and international observers all combine to provide a multidimensional kaleidoscope of the challenges India faces in the new millennium.

International Perspectives

Keith Vaz, Member of  Parliament, U.K., and  Chair of the Indo-British Parliamentary Group

Constructively and imaginatively handled, Indo-British relations have the potential of becoming the ‘jewel in the crown’ of civilised international relations in the new millennium. Within the framework of enlightened self interest, the relationship between the two countries would respect mutual independence and self determination and also include key issues such as environmental protection, human rights, basic labor standards, fair trade, accountable government, and the rights of women and indigenous people.

Congressman Sherrod Brown, Democrat , Ohio,

We need to strengthen the bonds of friendship and cooperation between the United States and India. He illustrates the philosophical and humanitarian connections between the United States and India as embodied in Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and argues that this link has now been extended to diplomatic dialague and trade agreements as India grows in strategic and economic importance.

Former Senator Rod Grams, Republican from Minnesota

The United States can play a key role in India and that Asian Indians in America have contributed a lot to American society. He calls for a ‘new beginning’ in Indo-U. S. relations. He laments the ‘missed opportunities’ of the past that could be traced to the United States’ ill fated diplomatic overture in 1792 when Cornwallis refused to accept the credentials  of George Washington’s envoy to India.

Vernon Mendis, Director General of the Bandarnaike International Diplomatic Training Institute in Sri Lanka

India’s leadership in  South Asia rests on its ability to allay fears of Indian hegemony over its neighbors. The ‘Gujural Doctrine’ is the step in the right direction.

Zubeida Mustafa, Assistant Editor,  Dawn, Pakistan

It is time for India and its South Asian neighbors to cooperate over social issues. Solving the social question in turn will bring more stability in the region. She calls, like the other authors in the section, for a resolution of the Kashmir issue.

Domestic Perspectives

Professor T. K. Oommen, Jawarhalal Nehru University, New Delhi

Professor Oommen provides an excellent overview of some major challenges India faces in the new millennium. The first challenge, the political consolidation of India, remains unfinished because of a faulty conceptualization of both the British and Indians. Religion was the basis for the construction of three states (wrongly referred to as “nations”), India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. What both failed to realize was that within a civilizational region there could be several nations; all nations need not have sovereign states; and multinational states are both a conceptual possibility and an empirical necessity. Challenges of cultural estrangement, social discrimination and cultural insulation/destruction are linked to specific characteristics of Indian society. Challenges of economic disparity and political centralization are manifestation of India’s failure to uphold its constitutional promises. Finally, the challenges of consumerism, corruption, and criminalization, incipiency of civil society, rural-urban divide and environmental degradation are linked to the faulty model of modernization that India adopted.

Mammen Mathew, Editor, Malayalam Manorama,

The Press in India has played multidimensional roles from educator to crusader against evils. He sees the biggest challenge in the new millennium to be the, “insidious march of linguistic colonialism”, namely the domination of English over local languages. In some ways, the battle for the Indian soul.\

P. D. Mathew, an advocate in the Supreme Court of India and Programme Director of the Programme for Legal Aid in Delhi

The Indian judiciary is widely regarded as a stabilizing and unifying element in India and a catalyst and facilitator of the welfare of the people, especially the poor. He discusses some of the challenges facing the judiciary in India, namely, issues such as the independence of the judiciary, the role of the activist judge and suggestion for administrative reforms to speed up the tremendous backlog of cases pending before the courts.

Sectors
The North East India has and continues to be a neglected area of India. Two papers, the first by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners provide an overview of the region and the second paper by Bishop Stephen Rotluanga and  Lallianna Mualchin focus on the challenges faced by one of the seven states in the North East, Mizoram. Focus on this region will provide both a sense of the complex challenges faced by India as well as a measure of  how ‘deep’ progress in India reaches in the new millennium.

John Chattnath, professor at Vidyajothi College in Delhi provides a Gandhian vision for India. Gandhi’s measured progress from the perspective of  the poor and downtrodden and so a Gandhian analysis of recent economic reforms by Chattnath reveals that the poor are worse off. Chattnath calls for a new order in India based on truth, built on justice and graced by love.

Amita Kapur, President of Child Relief and You, focuses on the challenges faced by children in the new millennium. Among the strategies she advocates are: strategies to empower women and to target the girl child, improved health and educational facilities, population control, and adoption of the norm, ‘have one, adopt one’.

Alok Mukhopahyay, Executive Director, Voluntary Health Association of India stresses the importance of primary health care in India. Among the suggestions in his paper is the institution of an Indian Health Service patterned after the Indian Administrative Services, greater attention to alternative systems of medicine, and an increase in the budget of the health sector to around 5 percent.

Autar Dhesi, Professor,  Guru Nanak University in Punjab, laments the misallocation of resources in India in favour of higher education and to the detriment of primary education. Specific reforms for higher education in India should be in four directions: greater differentiation of higher education in institutions, diversificationof funding resources, redefinition of the role of the state, and the introduction of  policies explicitly designed to give priority to quality and equity.

Richard D’Souza, Conservator of Forests and Joe D’Souza, Professor at Goa University discuss some issues in forest policy in India such as protection of tribals, reforms in social forestry and the role of environmental education.

Finally, Bruce Corrie present a measure to assess progress in India in the new millennium in the form of a  human development index for the Dalit child in India. Dalit children are one of India’s most vulnerable populations.