Our press and patriots made quite a splash to mark the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s tragic death. As it happened, it was also, to significant sections among us, the 25th anniversary of the tragic massacre of Sikhs in
In the hurly-burly of the Indira Gandhi emotions, we barely noticed the 20th anniversary of an event that changed the course of history – the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. It was of course much more than the pulling down of a wall that separated communist territory from
Those epochal developments were interpreted narrowly in
Twenty years later
To believe that Mikhael Gorbachev was responsible for the Soviet Empire’s fall would be to fall into a trap. Powerful as the Soviet Union was – no one can deny Stalin’s profound achievements in building the country into a military powerhouse that could withstand both Hitler’s onslaughts and subsequent American strategies of containment – the country had begun haemorrhaging from within long before Gorbachev ascended the hot seat.
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Militarisation was at the expense of everything else. Factories had no time to produce essentials and therefore shortages made the lives of people miserable. In time such harsh realities produced tensions and the widespread, if un-expressed, feeling that they were suffering when others (in the West) were living well. AT the same time, the financial resources of the country were drained by what were seen as unavoidable overseas exercises of superpowers in the cold war era – supporting guerilla movements in various developing countries and sustaining economic ties (which meant huge subsidies) with “friendly” regimes like Mongolia, Cuba and East European satellites. Gorbachev’s contribution was merely his refusal to use violence to suppress local self-assertion movements.
When the mighty Soviet colossus fell, two after-shocks rocked the world. The first was the recognition that rigid socialism that denied basic comforts to citizens was unsustainable, that aspects of capitalism that allowed individual freedoms had a natural appeal to human nature. The second was the acceptance of these realities by
The progress