This volume consists of the proceed­ings of a conference on India sponsored by the Asia Society in New York and held in September 1977. The organizers of the conference were two US AID offi­cials, Arthur Gardiner, Jr. and John Mellor, assisted by Marshall Bouton (now in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi) and Philip Oldenburg of the Asia So­ciety. The objective, as stated by Mellor in the preface, was to re-examine ‘U.S. policy toward India’ and to analyse ‘the role renewed American foreign assistance to India could play in a context of improved Indo-American relations.’ It is interesting to note that the conference was first broached in USAID in the Spring of 1976—i.e., while Mrs. Gandhi was still Prime Minister of India—and thus was not a response to the expecta­tions of a closer Indo-U.S. relationship following the March 1977 elections. Pre­sumably USAID thought the process had already started in 1976. The participants in the conference included several of the most distinguished American specialists on India as well as U.S. officials who had served in India on extended assignments, mostly with USAID (curiously, the ‘India Desk’ side of the State Department was unre­presented). Several Indian scholars, then resident in the U.S. (at Harvard or the World Bank) or Canada, also parti­cipated, but in all but one case—as com­mentators on papers presented by the Americans. While the subject matter of the papers cover a wide range of political, economic, and international issues, there are two common themes that run throughout. The first is U.S. policy toward India, usually portrayed as having been seriously misdirected in several critical respects since the early 1950s. But perhaps even more important, to the American participants at least, was the concern with the negative ‘Indian image’ in the U.S. ­and, indeed, in Europe and most of the Third World which emphasizes India's deficiencies and failures and ignores the quite remarkable achievements made in the economic, political, and social fields since 1947. The target audience for this volume is both the official and academic publics in the United States, and the objective is to contribute toward a more balanced and favorable comprehension of India, both in terms of its internal development and its role in regional and global power politics. Critical analyses of India are virtually nonexistent. Indeed, even as hard line a nuclear ...