The South Asia Story by Gould Harold A

Author:Gould, Harold A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publications India Pvt, Ltd -- eBooks

Photograph 9.1: Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with U.S. President Ronald Reagan during her 1982 visit to U.S.

Photograph 9.2: Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi receives from U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean the first copy of a book commemorating 40 years of Indo-U.S. Cooperation

Even before Rajiv's visit, there had been signs of a new mood in Indo-U.S. relations, which had reverberated all the way to Capitol Hill. Conservative Senator Orin Hatch sang India's praises on the floor of the United States Senate. “I believe a historic shift is underway,” he had intoned. He went on to say, “Ten years from now scholars will look back on this last year as the end to the Ice Age…”

However, Rajiv Gandhi, due to his political inexperi-ence, had pretty much lost control both of his agenda and the Congress Party by the end of his tenure in 1989 when Congress was voted out of office by the Janata Dal coalition led by V.P. Singh. This proved to be a very unstable phase in Indian politics, which saw the rapid rise and fall of three prime ministers (viz., Rajiv Gandhi, V.P. Singh, and Chandra Shekhar) within a four-year time span (1989–1993). The denouement of these tumul-tuous times was Rajiv's assassination (May 21, 1991) while campaigning for a return to office. His successor, P.V. Narasimha Rao (1991–1996), proved to be pol-itically durable and got the Congress Party and the country back on track, no doubt because the forces driv-ing change both within India and around the world were proving to be irresistible. The world was on the cusp of the dawning global economy, very much influenced by the impact of so-called “Reaganomics”; Rao clearly foresaw its economic and strategic implications and commenced the process of moving his country toward a more deregulated economy and a more flexible, prag-matic diplomacy.

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