Vajpayee at the Potomac- Anil Nair
It is a thin red line that separates mature deshbhakthi from its yodelling version. Heaping shagadelic plaudits in print on our martyrs or installing them in video Valhalla in this age of saturation coverage will not, and should not, justify even one casualty than is absolutely necessary. As a way of offsetting World Cup ignominy we should resist the temptation of being obsessed with Deathwatch Kargil.........
It is only natural that Kashmir being the political hot potato that it is at the moment, Vajpayee turned down Clinton's invitation to go to Washington. More significantly, given America's track record in the subcontinent it rightly deserves to be judged guilty until proven innocent............
But there are important changes too. It is evident that the United States is genuinely sensitive about forcing anything upon India this time around. This new found sensitivity is not due to any simple matter of niceties. There are powerful subterranean currents at work which India better pay heed to and capitalise if we are not to go back to square one with Pakistan: go back to routine secretary-level talks after all that has happened at Kargil.
Kosovo, many political observers rightly pointed out, heralded a new international order, but not as they would have everyone believe, one that is uni-polar with the US as the headquarters of Arrogance Unlimited Inc.
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Post-Cold War the principal menace to peace will emanate not from strong states bursting out of their borders but from weak ones that cannot keep the peace within. This makes the United Nations Charter that confers nationhood on every scrap of territory, and its corollary that what goes on within these half-incubated polities is their own matter, dangerously redundant.
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Pakistan without doubt belongs to this category of 'not-quite states' and to enable it to grow out of it requires, though it is not politically correct to say so, a partial return to the good old days of the British district commissioner dispensing justice under the date palm.
More than territory or the shariat, what Pakistan's entrenched elites -- and these include the generals -- seek out of issues like Kashmir is to be transported from the perpetual squalor and disgrace of their domestic situation to the heaven of chauffeur-driven Mercedes, luxurious embassies, Swiss bank accounts and glamorous photo ops with Clinton and Blair
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Building a strategic partnership with the US -- like the one we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War -- is a wager India must cover. In the short run it will deliver us a coup by allowing us to extricate ourselves from the tribal conflict in Kashmir while making the Americans, and by extension the international community, the hatchet man in case our intransigent neighbour refuses to go by the script....
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