There is a tendency among us to be cynical about our achievements. While it is true there could be a debate over whether we could have achieved more in the economic front when even countries much smaller than India in East Asia. India's growth rate has drawn even jests from some quarters who described it as “Hindu rate of growth”. Funnily India's economy has described as a sleeping giant despite all these sarcasm , ridicule and all that. The critics also make a comparison with China and cite its spectacular performance in the realm of economic development overlooking the fact that there are some fundamental difference between a democracy and a party-led dictatorship.

China might be well ahead in various fields but what India achieved in the course of last 63 years keeping in mind the myriad problems we encountered and successfully met and by retaining our plural culture and by reposing our complete faith in democracy. This is no mean achievement.

Despite the constraints imposed by the democratic polity that we have opted for ourselves, our success in the economic field over the last 25 years has raised superpower ambition. Even the US and the Western powers have been acknowledging India's potential to emerge as a major power along with China, Brazil and South Africa. In the internal sphere, we have succeeded in a great measure in arresting the fissiparous tendencies in the North-East parts of the country. We have never opted for use of brutal state power to meet the challenges posed by these forces and have chosen dialogue to find an amicable solution to this problem.

Our success in persuading the MNF in Mizoram to join the mainstream is an example. If one recollects the events at Tienmann Square in China, where the government did not think twice to crush a democratic students' movement for freedom with tanks rolling on the bodies of their own people, the point of difference with India would be absolutely clear