2021 Preface
Three or four points are necessary by way of a Preface in 2021 for this work created by myself and the late Ted James at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, & East West Center starting 1986. First it was Ted’s initiative along with his colleague the late Seiji Naya at the East West Center that we work on “South Asia” as soon as they had heard I had gotten to the University in 1986. The moneys officially came from the University, ie the State of Hawaii, from funds owed as rent to the State by the East West Centre, ie by the US Government. So, formally speaking, the State of Hawaii may take credit for the sponsorship.
It was at my insistence that we decided to create a distinct Pakistan project in parallel to our initial purpose of a “perestroika for India” project. The sister volume on India was entirely of my design; yes these projects arose from Hawaii, not grander universities whose India-policy programs were Johnny-come-latelies a decade or more later…
Both India and Pakistan volumes were published initially by the late Tejeshwar Singh for Sage in Delhi; the Pakistan volume was also published by Oxford in Karachi to good reviews, but then came to be, shall we say, lost. The reviews will also be made available here. “(I)t was Rajiv’s arrival in office and Benazir’s initial return to Pakistan, along with the rise of Michael Gorbachev in the changing USSR, that inspired me in far away Hawaii in 1986 to design with Ted James the perestroika-projects for India and Pakistan which led to our two volumes….There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune….”
This Pakistan volume was of our joint design; I invited the Francis Robinson, Akbar Ahmed, John Adams chapters; Ted invited all the others; both of us agreed on all decisions. The military and religious clergy had been deliberately not invited by us though the name of Pervez Musharraf had I think arisen, and the military and religious clergy in fact came to rule the roost through the 1990s in Pakistan; this volume, almost three decades old, takes on fresh relevance with the new civilian governments of recent years.
Francis Robinson, Akbar Ahmed, Shirin Tahir-Kehli, Robert La Porte Jr, Shahid Javed Burki, Mohsin Khan, Mahmood Hasan Khan, Naved Hamid, John Adams and Shahrukh Khan are the set of authors here, and each has copyright of his/her own chapter; the copyright of the whole collection is with the President of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and was delegated to the editors formally in 1996. Ted and I pleaded with the publishers for paperback editions, and in case of the Pakistan volume an Urdu translation, but we failed. Ted did obtain in 1996 the President’s permission for us to reproduce the works freely in interest of knowledge, and now I am finally uploading it as pdf copies that may be downloaded. Ted died prematurely in 2010, and I am in search of a co-editor who may take his place for the further development of perhaps second editions.
In 2004 I said “… if our plan to study Afghanistan after India and Pakistan had not been thwarted by malign local forces among our sponsors themselves, we, a decade before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, may just have come up with a pre-emptive academic analysis. It was not to be.”
Finally, my assessment of the Kashmir problem in the Introduction is something that came to be lifted without acknowledgement by two major Pakistani politicians and one major Indian politician; but I have explicitly withdrawn it myself as being naiive and ignorant. My assessments since then are linked here.
Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by William E James & Subroto Roy
Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy 
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