It may well be a tendency rooted in human nature that both individuals and larger collectivities, when faced with an intractable problem, like to think that someone, somewhere, must have the definitive solution. This tendency has certainly been visible in the area of Third World development. When this area was first brought into public consciousness in the years following World War II, there was the widespread assumption (by no means limited to North Americans and Europeans) that the advanced industrial societies of the West had discovered the secret of development. They constituted the model; the problem for other societies was how to follow this model as rapidly and painlessly as possible. This was the time when Talcott Parsons, for example, could refer to the United States as the "lead society," sincerely believing that this designation reflected sober social-scientific analysis rather than messianic nationalism. Then came the great ideological upheaval of the late 1960s and early '70s. The success of the Western model was either challenged in toto—as was done by Marxists of various denominations—or at least deemed to be negative in its effects on non-Western societies— as in the perspective of the more moderate versions of "dependency theory." The American "lead society" model was replaced by miscellaneous "vanguard societies," ranging from China to Tanzania, that had little in common except a commitment to a socialist development strategy.

Events of recent years have focused considerable attention on northeast India, particularly on tribal uprisings, insurgency, the problem of aliens, the involvement of foreign agencies, political horse trading, and natural disasters. At the same tune, ethnic and religious factors have been almost wholly ignored—this despite the fact that they have a decisive influence on the institutions of democracy and, since India's independence, have acquired quite new and different nuances.

In 1950 northeast India consisted of the State of Assam and the Union Territories of Manipur and Tripura. With the passage of the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganization) Act of 1971, the northeast emerged as a significant administrative concept. The more familiar unit of Assam was replaced by a North-Eastem Council (NEC) to deal with planning and security.

By now the origins of the debt crisis—too much borrowing by Third World countries and too much lending by banks and industrialized nations—are reasonably well understood. What has only just begun is a flood of scholarly articles and muckraking journalism about the collusion between various parties pursuing narrow profits rather than the wider public interest.

It is perhaps both natural and understandable that most of these analyses and commentaries are focusing on the complexity of the problem and offering complicated cures. After all, the number and variety of countries in debt is large and growing. Similarly, the number of public, private, bilateral, and multilateral institutions involved in the crisis constitutes a mind-boggling alphabet soup. The jargon too is forbidding. There is financing and refinancing, scheduling and rescheduling, Special Drawing Rights and Structural Adjustment, to mention only what every newspaper reader has to struggle through. And there is the umbrella term conditionality, which, of course, is difficult to understand in the intricate detail of its application, implementation, and implication.