India's new president: focus is on prosperity, not terrorism
Pranab Mukherjee's acceptance speech highlights how India sees its sharpest threat as slower-than-expected economic growth, not Pakistan and its Islamic militant proxies.
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In truth, India’s actions in Kashmir are increasingly at odds with the new image it’s trying to project globally as a responsible advocate of democratic norms – a point argued in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.
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Deputy International Editor
Ben Arnoldy is the Deputy International Editor at The Christian Science Monitor. He has served as the Monitor's bureau chief in India and Northern California.
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Nearly 65 percent of residents of the Kashmir Valley still say they want independence. While India succeeded in putting down an armed insurgency from Kashmiris and Pakistanis during the 1990s, New Delhi has been unable to win a peace by finding a political solution to Kashmiri aspirations. Instead, India maintains a massive police state in the contested land.
A stunning BBC Channel 4 documentary this month detailed the widespread use of torture in Kashmir by Indian security forces. The Monitor followed the report with a look at how torture houses still dot the landscape of Kashmir.
Last year, the state government of Kashmir acknowledged for the first time that thousands of bodies lie in unmarked graves around the state.
Yet, India has kept human rights violations in Kashmir out of its court system by giving blanket immunity to security forces there. As a recent New York Times report put it, “Mass murderers walk the streets openly, having killed thousands of people who are buried in unmarked graves in scores of secret cemeteries.”
Prosperity is the prime goal
Many in India, however, appear to view Kashmir as a conflict of the past. And in his speech, Mukherjee argues India must not focus on the past but the future. That means revving up the economy again from the anemic 5.3 percent growth in the first quarter of 2012 back up to China-chasing levels of 8-plus percent.
The reasons for India’s slowdown are myriad, from deep corruption to political paralysis over economic reforms. Even India’s success in integrating with the global economy is partly to blame, exposing the country to the downward trends in Europe.
But Mukherjee homes in on what could either make or break India’s future.
“In my view, education is the alchemy that can bring India its next golden age,” he said. “Our motto is unambiguous: All for knowledge, and knowledge for all.”
In a recent cover story, the Monitor looked at this daunting education challenge:
To accommodate this crush of young people, the Indian government says the country must build 1,000 universities and 50,000 colleges within the next decade. By comparison, the total number of colleges in the United States, including two-year institutions, is 4,200….
[Q]uestions loom. Is India on the verge of a new renaissance or is this effort an overreaching bound to fall of its own ambition? How do you maintain any kind of quality control in such a massive scale-up of schools? Will the legendary bureaucracy of India stifle its quest to be the world's new cerebellum?
Mr. President, best of luck.
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