India Briefing: Takeoff at Last?

• Author: Prabhakar, W. Lawrence S.
• Position: Book Review

India Briefing: Takeoff at Last? Edited by Alyssa Ayres and Philip Oldenburg. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. Softcover: 285pp.

"India Rising" has been the constant refrain in the global academic, policy, and strategic communities. The past decade has been momentous in terms of India's robust economic and industrial growth, its burgeoning knowledge capital and industrial capabilities--a new confidence in its foreign policy and diplomatic initiatives and an assertion of its strategic and military capabilities that had come with the 1998 nuclear tests and an expanding versatile profile of its maritime power.

Globalization has been the pivotal force of India's social and economic transformation that has unshackled its potential. The paradigm shift from its autarkic economic process to a liberalized competitive process has been crucial in the realization of W.W. Rostow's conception of the "takeoff" stage of economic robustness.

India Briefing is a project of the Asia Society, New York. It has been a systematic, coherent, and rigorous commentary on India's promise and performance. Articulated on an annual basis as a review of the country's systemic performance, it comprehensively assesses the rising Asian power's political capacity, social cohesion, economic viability, strategic autonomy and operations, technological capabilities and its knowledge capital.

The volume entitled India Briefing: Takeoff at Last?--the eleventh publication in the series of annual reviews that has been eloquently written with rigour, factual substance, and analysis by several eminent authors brings to focus the vicissitudes of India with its glowing and promising performance of a credible takeoff curve that has been convincing. The editors of this volume, Alyssa Ayres and Philip Oldenburg have structured the thematic organization of this book predicated on the changing contours of Political India and Economic India as the primary pillars of India's transformation.

India Briefing: Takeoff at Last? commences with an Introduction that is a review of India in retrospect. The editors analyse the issues of significance of India that have furnished the rationale to label the subtitle Takeoff at Last.

Niraja Gopal Jayal sketches the essay "Politics: The BJP Falls from Power" based on the analysis of the political narratives of democracy and coalition governance in India. It analyses the causal symptoms of the BJP-NDA alliance (Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic...