At a recent meeting on tribals in Delhi the cake went to a young scholar from the Northeast, Borborra. When they are that young and good, they always surprise you with their vigour and energy and ability to cut through cant.

When you have the police and Army after you on one side and the terrorists on the other, what is your concept of existence and identity, he asked and then went on to point towards the answer, without actually giving it, all the time apologising for not being very logical, in terms not very flattering to our constitutional niceties and implicitly shared values in a large part of the rest of the country.

This identity question never really leaves a thoughtful Indian. Historian Nurul Hasan chaired a seminar on Indian identities when I was a very young man and he was still not a minister. I asked him after a long rambling description how I was always an outsider, even in my native Chakwal in what is now Pakistan because I went to school in Calcutta and many people would playfully call me a Bengali. I had also been called a Rajasthani, a Gujarati, a Dilliwala and, of course, a Punjabi, always outside Rajasthan, Gujarat, Dilli and the Punjab. I was called an Indian only when I reached the US. Nurul Saheb told me I was all of them.

Years later, I was the accompanying minister with Narayanan Saheb on an official visit, amongst other places, to Mongolia. Our Ambassador was the famous Buddhist Lama from Ladakh who in the Avloketeshwara tradition was a Living God to many Buddhist Mongolians. An Ambassador from a very powerful country told me how we can compete diplomatically with the Indians. I also met a lot of Alaghs in Mongolia for it is a very popular name there and means honour. Khan Alagh, in the times of the great Chenghiz, stood up for Mongolian chivalry and paid for it with his life, a fate many Alaghs faced in different historical epochs.

... contd.