When going got tough for Sattar

The MEA is getting ready to pull out all the stops to ensure the victory of Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee over Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar at an election to the UN Subcommission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights next month. Significantly, news reports in the Pakistani press referring to Sattar having lost the confidence of General Musharraf have been confirmed by none other than the Islamabad foreign office itself telling the UN agency in New York, that Sattar will be contesting membership as ‘‘he is expected to return to private life soon.’’ Turns out that Sorabjee is already on this sub-committee, headed by Bahrain, along with a representative from China. Problem is, there are only three slots for Asia, and with Pakistan, Cyprus and another country from the Arab world also contesting membership, an election is now on the cards in April.

Here’s the sting in the tail : The Pakistani foreign office needn’t have told either Bahrain or the UN subcommission that Sattar was returning soon to ‘‘private life.’’ Rules allow members to keep their jobs, Sorabjee being an example. Clearly, Someone in Pakistan didn’t like Sattar too much.

Backing the wrong horse in Harare

India must be terribly insecure about its own democratic system to have been reduced to supporting Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe only for the last 22 years, since the African colony became independent from Britain in 1980. India’s representatives to the Commonwealth election observer group — actor-turned-BJP MP Vinod Khanna and former election commissioner GVG Krishnamurthy — voted with other election observers to secure a pro-Mugabe vote, even as many observers, primarily from Western nations, denounced both the run-up to the election as well as the election process itself.

Clearly, New Delhi has been unable to cut the umbilical cord with its Cold War past, when ‘‘anti-imperialism’’ was, often and appropriately, the name of the game. Today’s fears, however, are rooted in the awareness that all hasn’t been well in Kashmir and statements that ‘‘interfere’’ in another country’s internal affairs could well rebound back home sooner than later. But instead of taking the initiative to declare from the rooftops that ‘‘democracy’’ is certainly not an exclusively Western value, New Delhi seems to have lethargically opted for the politically correct course. Even the Organisation of African Unity, the government argued, had declared Zimbabwe’s elections ‘‘transparent, credible, free and fair.’’

But as the Commonwealth threatened to split into ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘non-white’’ groupings came the bolt from the blue last week. Both South Africa and Nigeria, under pressure from the European Union (which promised additional sanctions) and the US (who threatened to cut off aid to Mugabe), turned around and voted along with Australia (these three nations form the C’wealth troika). Even as New Delhi gasped with surprise at the turn of events, Zimbabwe was summarily suspended from the Council of the Commonwealth.

The president from the clouds

Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri’s much-postponed visit to New Delhi is finally taking place next week. Sukarno’s daughter’s links with India go back a long, long way, actually from the time of her birth, when she was named by none other than the irrepressible Biju Patnaik. The story goes that Patnaik was visiting his old friend Sukarno when Mega’s mother (a Hindu from an old Javanese family) gave birth to a baby girl. It was a cloudy day and Biju, it is said, named her Mega (the Sanskrit for ‘‘rain’’, of course, being megha). The rest, as they say, is history and foreign policy.

Big Benz

The poorer the country, the bigger their cars — at least on a visit abroad. The stretch Mercedes-Benz limousine carrying Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba all over town during his visit last week was so embarrassingly huge, it had trouble reversing in the reasonably spacious driveway of the Nepalese embassy.

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