Emily MacFarquhar, A Keen Student Of India And Pakistan

PREM SHANKAR JHA

On the 18^th of last month India, and indeed the south Asian subcontinent lost one of its keenest political analysts and a steadfast friend. Emily Macfarquhar, one time Asia Editor of the Economist, and foreign editor of the US News and World Report, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Emily was American, but joined the Economist in 1965 and lived in England till 1986. All through this period she stayed with the paper as it's principal writer on South Asia and China. Both the Economist and the New York Times published obituaries on her, and both devoted a good deal of space to her interest in and knowledge of China. But Emily's real love affair had been with Pakistan and India. It began with her marriage to the highly respected China scholar and founder of the China Quarterly, Roderick Macfarquhar, whom she met in 1964 while in New Delhi, on her way back to the United States after a year in Taiwan. Rod's father had been in the Indian civil Service, so he had spent his childhood and early 'teens in India and Pakistan. He never got over the imprinted memories of his childhood and the abiding affection they gave him for the two countries. Not surprisingly, he was in Delhi to cover Pandit Nehru's funeral.

Over the years, Rod's abiding interest in the tumultuous progress of the subcontinent infected Emily, and as Asia editor of the Economist she came frequently to the subcontinent. Apart from writing more than one Survey of India during those decades, Emily also covered the Bangladesh war for the paper. Emily maintained a deep professional interest in both India and Pakistan, but while she grew to respect India she came to love Pakistan. It is not difficult to see why. Understanding India posed a challenge, and one has only to remember her Surveys to see how well she met it. But Pakistan was a much smaller country, making a new start as a nation, with a gutsy intelligentsia that was battered by successive coups, and constantly yearning for democracy. It, and specifically its beleaguered intelligentsia, was infinitely easier to sympathise, and identify, with.

In 1986 Rod was asked to head the government department at Harvard University Emily therefore left the Economist and moved to Cambridge, Mass. For the next decade she was foreign editor and then consulting editor of the US News and World Report. Till the end of her life Emily retained an abiding interest in and affection for India and Pakistan. Her last work, which she suspended when she was diagnosed to have a brain tumour in 1999, was a biography of Benazir Bhutto.

I first met Emily in the early 'seventies on one of her trips to India and got to know her awe-inspiring editorial skills when she got me to write a one-page piece for the Economist in the late 'seventies on India's second Green Revolution. During the nineties I met her frequently in Cambridge and New Delhi, and discerned a gradual, almost imperceptible change in her perceptions of the subcontinent. While her involvement with, and respect for India deepened as we solved problem after problem without forsaking democracy, she felt a growing disappointment with Pakistan, and a very personal anguish at its increasingly intractable problems. She recognised their depth but never ceased to hope that Pakistan would somehow surmount them. She felt that India had a duty to help because it was the older, larger country, and because the fate of the two countries was inextricably intertwined. It was difficult to disagree with her perception, but more difficult to identify precisely what India could do to help.