The episode that we were trying to put together was in three parts: an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu on the Middle East peace process; a story on the Armenian Church in Iran and a focus on Indian police officers training the Bosnian police in Sarajevo and Mostar. Netanyahu is Jewish, the Armenian church surely Christian and the police officers in Bosnia our very own, doing us proud in spite of the status reversal the UN system subjects them to. Although we subsequently decided to change that episode, the question remained -- where was the ``Muslim, Muslim'' in all of this?

Netanyahu, well before the triangular summit in Wye, Maryland, was so hard on the Palestinians and the Arab neighbgours that sympathies would tilt in their favour. The Armenian Church was shown to be surviving, Armenian vodkaet al, in Islamic Iran which made the latter look reasonable. And Indian officers in Bosnia brought out in bold relief the atrocities committed on the Muslims in Sarajevo from 1992 to 95. My friend's complaint, it turned out, was in fact his expression of surprise at being exposed to foreign affairs beyond his habitual diet of Pakistan and the United States, with Kashmir thrown in for good measure.

The reality is that my friend is not an exception.

Excessive focus on Muslim Pakistan distorts our vision of Muslim societies in general. Since Pakistan has plagued us from its very inception, our subconscious sees all Muslim societies in adversarial terms. Pakistan's foreign policy aimed at restricting our options in external affairs.

This Pakistan was able to do for a long period, with regard to the 54 members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference after the Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad incident in Rabat. We never had a clear strategy to deal with OIC. From one OIC summit to another, totally uninformed on howthe system worked, we simply fell back on kneejerk responses to Pakistani machinations on Kashmir.

When ethnic cleansing, mass graves and rape camps in Bosnia shocked Europe, what was our response? Nothing, as far as I can remember. For years the siege of Sarajevo lasted and the west did nothing. At that stage Benazir Bhutto and Turkey's Ciller made that spectacular dash to the besieged capital of Bosnia. For this gesture, Pakistan manipulated Bosnia to co-sponsor an anti-India resolution in Geneva. Any country as desperate as Bosnia would have responded favourably towards a country which had shown it sympathy.

We kept finding excuses for demonstrating no sympathy for the victims of the worst atrocities committed since the World War II. First, we could not abandon our ``historic'' ties with Belgrade. Our traditional ties were with Tito of Yugoslavia, not Milosevic of Serbia! Second, why should we rush in where angels fear to tread? And finally, after Bosnia had been successfully manipulated by Pakistan,our case was iron clad: how can we sympathise with a people who co-sponsor resolutions at Pakistan's bidding?

People in Bosnia, like those in Central Asia, did not know Pakistan. They only knew India because of its ancient links with the Turkish people.

Everyone knows that Central Asia is all about oil and natural gas. Those are the assets the world is in pursuit of. It is common knowledge that in the Soviet system. Azerbaijan was the headquarters of this hydro-carbon boom.

Visit Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan) and you will find the shores of the Caspian sea lined with old oil rigs. Western oil companies have committed billions of dollars towards exploring the Caspian oil.

And, believe it or not, we do not even have an embassy in Sarajevo. It can be argued that we do not have an embassy in Sarajevo because no major economic stakes are involved (although that by itself is not a convincing argument). But why, pray, have we ignored Baku?

The argument was that Azerbaijan's conflict with Armenia made itdifficult for us to make a choice. How were we able to make a choice between Crotia and Bosnia? The two were in conflict but we opened an embassy in Zagreb, not in Sarajevo, which represents the composite culture we so celebrate.

Vasundhra Raje was the first Indian Minister to visit Baku, a city that is going to be as important as the Gulf in its oil potential. But it has been decided that in the interest of maintaining balance, we shall have embassies in Azerbaijan as well as Armenia. But when? After the oil boom is over?

Someone has observed that in recent years whenever a Muslim country has been in conflict with a non-Muslim one, we have tended to be indifferent with the Muslim state.

Do you notice now anti-Pakistanism has quite lazily transformed itself into a debilitating misperception of all Muslim societies?

The friend who saw ``too much Muslim, Muslim'' was only reflecting a creeping phobia, which afflicts sections of our establishment.