India

At the Financial Inclusion Summit in Delhi, India’s Minister of Finance, Pranab Mukherjee stated that the Indian banking system must implement “urgent measures to reach the unbanked segment of society and unlock their savings and investment potentials.” Indeed, it seems politicians, financial institutions, and government officials alike are “banking on inclusion” to address social and economic challenges facing millions of India’s low-income households.

Join the New America Foundation in hosting Ambassador Satinder K. Lambah, the Prime Minister of India's Special Envoy on Afghanistan, in an intimate off-the-record briefing on July 29 at 3:00pm.

There's something very poignant about the photographs of a beaming Hillary Clinton in India. Having fractured her elbow last month, the secretary of State has been undergoing a grueling regime of physical therapy, and until recently she was wearing a stylish sling. One has to assume that Clinton is still in pain, yet she's managed to put on a valiant show for the Indian throngs who've greeted her. When Clinton first visited India in 1995, she was festooned with garlands at every stop.

Two years ago, Pervez Musharraf, who was then Pakistan’s President and Army chief, summoned his most senior generals and two Foreign Ministry officials to a series of meetings at his military office in Rawalpindi. There, they reviewed the progress of a secret, sensitive negotiation with India, known to its participants as “the back channel.” For several years, special envoys from Pakistan and India had been holding talks in hotel rooms in Bangkok, Dubai, and London.

I hope with all my heart that most of what I am going to write in this article will prove mistaken. President Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East peace process, and of Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (and de facto American broker for the Kashmir issue), are both in themselves very positive moves. The Bush administration’s neglect of these two conflicts was among its more disgraceful foreign-policy omissions.

A few months ago, trucks loaded with goods crossed a border. All over the world, this kind of thing happens every day, but not here. October marked the first time in 60 years that Indian trucks loaded with apples and walnuts traveled to Pakistan. The trucks returned carrying a shipment of Pakistani rice and raisins.

Around the same time, India and Pakistan increased the number of goods the two nations could trade from just 13 to nearly 2,000. They opened new freight train lines and refurbished custom houses in anticipation of vigorous cross border trade.

The most important questions concerning the terrorist attacks in Mumbai are also obvious ones, yet are not asked nearly often enough by Western analysts. They are: What goals did the terrorists hope to achieve by these attacks? And how to what degree did they achieve them? Regrettably, the terrorists so far seem to have achieved at least a qualified success.