Spit and polish

IN my next birth, ambassador K S Bajpai is once known to have famously remarked, I would like to be born as the Pakistani high commissioner to India. Bajpai, who reopened New Delhi’s mission to Pakistan after the 1971 war, was of course commenting on the kind of access Pakistani high commissioners enjoy in India across the political, bureaucratic and social elite.

The suave and well-spoken Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the current incumbent, seemed kind of lost in Moscow and Beijing where he has served before, but in Delhi he has definitely been on top of the pops, thoroughly enjoying the privileges that he was or wasn’t entitled to. In fact, one of his daughters worked for a Pakistani newspaper soon after he arrived—thereby violating the two-journalist norm that both countries maintain, insisted upon by Pakistan—until one joint secretary in the MEA decided to put an end to that particular number.

So if you met Qazi last week, socially or otherwise, you would have noticed that he was unusually reticent, even nervous, at the turn of events in India after December 13, possibly because he was anticipating the recall of India’s high commissioner to Pakistan. Which meant, as a local wag pointed out, that Qazi would have to cut short his own tenure and return to Islamabad. And although the latter’s not happening now, New Delhi’s decision only to deal with Qazi’s deputy may be the cause for some of those beads of sweat on his brow.

Jaswant on song

EXTERNAL Affairs minister Jaswant Singh could well take credit for the latest US decision to put pressure on Poor Man Musharraf to act against the ‘‘leaders, finances and activities’’ of the two terrorist organisations, the Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Singh, it seems, has been burning the wires between Washington and New Delhi, exhorting the American leadership to take some action that would cool some of the anger against Pakistan at home. The last time the terrorists struck in similar manner, on October 1 against the J&K legislature in Srinagar, Singh was in Washington.

Under pressure from both the RSS and the BJP to perform — he is seen as the most pro-American minister even by his own tribe — Singh is said to have spent ‘‘about 95 per cent of his time’’ imploring the Americans to ‘‘do something.’’ At the time, though, the Bush administration was busy putting together its own war plans to strike in Afghanistan and hardly paid heed.

As one observer pointed out, the US is there to look after its own national interest — which at the moment at least is to be good to Musharraf — and is hardly responsible for protecting India’s national interest.

History’s lessons

INDIANS are famously accused of having no sense of history, which is probably why she repeats herself in this country, again and again, both as tragedy and farce. As Jaswant Singh flew to Afghanistan — twice in two years, in 1999 to Kandahar, this time to Kabul — over the weekend to represent India at the swearing-in of the Hamid Karzai interim administration, foreign policy observers pointed towards the links between India and Afghanistan over thousands of years. Interestingly, the city of Kandahar seems to play a major role in all these anecdotes. In the Mahabharata, Dhritarashtra’s wife Gandhari and her brother Shakuni hailed from this city. Later, in 326 BC, Alexander amassed his soldiers here before he launched his famous battle against Porus.

Much more recently, when IC-814 was hijacked to Kandahar, Jaswant Singh flew to that city, carrying with him on board the IAF aircraft Masood Azhar and two other terrorists. The policemen who guarded Masood Azhar recall with a shudder that horrible ride, as Azhar used the choicest expletives and abuse against Singh.

One for the PM

DIPLOMAT, author and currently, India’s high commissioner to Cyprus, Pavan K. Varma, has caused much heartburn within the IFS and outside with more than his fair share of newspaper space, but the near-silence about his latest venture must take the cake. Varma has translated the poetry of none other than the Prime Minister. The book, simply called Twenty-One Poems, will be launched on December 25 on Vajpayee’s birthday.

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