Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by
Urvashi Butalia
Review by: Lucian W. Pye
Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2000), p. 191
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20050025
Accessed: 25-03-2017 10:58 UTC

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 Recent Books

excellent context for understanding the one-size-fits-all, neoliberal orthodoxy

continuing terrorist violence perpetuated
by militants, many of whom are backed by
one side or the other.
The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the
Partition of India, by urvashi
butalia. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000,308 pp.
$54.95 (paper, $17.95).
An extraordinary oral history of a horren
dous human tragedy. Butalia's account of
the partition of India, when 12 million
people moved across the new national
boundaries and as many as 2 million died,
lays bare the passions of fear and hatred
that too often drive the India-Pakistan
relationship. She details the demographic
and ethnic developments that affected
partition and recounts the traumas that
women in particular experienced, including
her own family. The raw horror of it all
is mitigated by the author's skillful prose,
which draws the reader into the Indian
story. The frequent necessity of using
the glossary only makes more vivid the
unique social context of the tragedy.
Butalia's hope is that by putting the un
speakable into words, she will help heal
the trauma and thereby help repair the
India-Pakistan relationship.
Africa
GAIL M. GERHART
Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?Mauritanian
by the
world bank. New York: Oxford
political situation in Burundi during the
University Press, 2000, 292 pp. $30.00.
two years surrounding the 1994 genocide
The World Bank has come a long wayin neighboring Rwanda. Dispatched as a
since it first launched its campaign special
of
for developing economies more than 20
years ago. Growth is still the centerpiece
of its prescriptions for reform, but the
subtlety and range of its diagnoses and
prescriptions have markedly increased,
as this landmark prospectus for African
development amply illustrates. Added to
growth are now many other primary goals,
including poverty reduction (defined as
halving the number of people living on
less than $1 a day by the year 2015) and
passing the "ownership" of development
decisions from lenders and donors to the
policymakers of recipient governments. The
implications of these recommendations?
for income redistribution, reordered
political priorities, improved standards of
management, and qualitatively different
relationships between rich and poor
countries?are spelled out with as much
candor as the Bank's current development
discourse permits. But the Bank's annoying
habit of tiptoeing around its own failings
remains. The worst effects of structural
adjustment programs are barely mentioned,
and only two pages are devoted to the
urgent need for debt relief. Nevertheless,
this report is essential input to any dis
cussion of African development today.
Burundi on the Brink, i?pj-?f.'A UN
Special Envoy Reflects on Preventive
Diplomacy, by ahmedou ould
abdallah. Washington: United
States Institute of Peace Press, 2000,
170 pp. $8.95 (paper).
This instructive memoir by a senior
diplomat examines the
U.N. representative with a mandate

FOREIGN AFFAIRS- November / December 2000 [ 191 ]

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