what are the challenge that convert India after the end of cold war and disintegration of Soviet union
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The breakup of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on India. In many ways, it paved the way for a reinvention of the country: from a stultified, socialist economy to a more dynamic, capitalist one; from a foreign policy defined by suspicion of America to one defined by shared interests and even mutual affection; and from public attitudes that frowned on individualism, consumerism and ambition to a nation that today exalts those same qualities.
A founding member of the global non-aligned movement, India was never a Communist country. But it was far closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States throughout the Cold War, buying weapons on concessional terms, doing barter trade with the Eastern Bloc and receiving financial and technical aid for industrial and infrastructure projects.
I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.
There were many reasons for the closeness between India and the Soviet Union, not least of which was a U.S. foreign policy that tilted decisively toward Pakistan. But the closeness was born, too, of genuine ideological affinity.
In 1926, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister, visited the Soviet Union and came away deeply impressed. An ardent believer in democracy, he was skeptical of Communism’s emerging political shape, but he was inspired by the Soviet economic model, which he felt had much to offer his own country.
At Indian independence, Nehru helped shape an economy that was substantially modeled after the Soviet template: five-year plans, central planning and a dominant public sector that would assume — as Nehru, borrowing Lenin’s phrase, put it — the “commanding heights” of the economy.
By the late 1980s, that economy was creaking — sagging under the weight of excessive government control, stifling in the same stew of inefficiency and bureaucratic mismanagement that was bringing down the Soviet empire.
In the summer of 1991, a few months before leaders of the Soviet Union would meet in a dacha outside Moscow to formally dissolve their nation, India confronted a severe balance of payments crisis. Left with foreign currency reserves worth just weeks of imports, the government was forced to begin dismantling the import barriers and state controls that were restricting the economy.