Author: Rashmee Z Ahmed
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 14, 2004
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/778322.cms
India stands out in the UN's newest
Human Development Report "as a country that has bravely embraced cultural
diversity" and its record is not tarred by the Gujarat violence, the report's
lead author Sakiko Fukuda-Parr has exclusively told TNN.
In comments likely to be controversial,
she said that even though there had been "sectarian violence in Gujarat,
terrible violence happened but it was not a cause of policies enacted by
India".
And she indicated that India's nearly
decade-long tryst with a Hindu nationalist-led government could not detract
from its remarkable record- both modern and mediaeval-of cultural tolerance.
"In multi-communitarian states like
India, political movements around identity will be around forever and you
need to respond democratically," she declared.
But this new adulation from the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which annually commissions
the report, still does not prevent India from languishing in the bottom
one-third of the 177-country Human Development Index (HDI) compiled by
Fukuda-Parr.
Sandwiched between Namibia and Botswana,
India is at number 127 of the HDI's measurement of its achievements in
providing its people the three basic dimensions of human development-a
long and healthy life; knowledge and a decent standard of living.
The HDI, which marks its 10th birthday
this year, was created by the Pakistani development planner and UN official,
the late Dr Mahbubul Haq, as an alternative to income as a summary measure
of human well-being.
Thursday's report, with its emphasis
on cultural freedoms, is symbolically released in Brussels, the heart of
the expanding, multi-cultural, multi- ethnic and multi-religious European
Union project.
In what's thought to be the UN's
first, key and landmark official debunking of US professor Samuel Huntington's
clash of civilisations theory, Amartya Sen argues it is a false fear.
Sen's essay, in the report, highlights
Ashoka and Akbar as proof that liberty and tolerance are not "a special
feature of Western civilisation". Insists Fukuda-Parr, who jointly with
Haq led the teams producing the annual report from 1995, "there is no evidence
of clash of civilisations. Even if you look at conflict in India, clashes
are not about values, they are often about power and resources".
