M A I N   N E W S

Indians’ tolerance for all faiths comes in for praise in US cable
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 18
More leaks on Saturday of diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in New Delhi turned out to be music for Indian ears. At least some of it.

One of the cables said America can learn a lot from Indians’ tolerance for all faiths. Extremists in India were outnumbered by ‘secular’ moderates, it stated. While risks of isolated cases of sectsrian remained, the country’s traditions of communal co-habitation and non-violent political protest have stood firm again global trends.

Yet another cable held that separatism and religious extremism have little appeal to Indian Muslims. The then US envoy David Mulford said in the cable that the vast majority of the Muslims remained committed to the Indian state.

But New Delhi’s indifference to terror activities in the North-East was pointed out in another cable, released by Wikileaks and posted in The Guardian. Terror activities in the North-East are not a priority for the government as civilian deaths due to terrorism have been declining there. Another reason for New Delhi’s complacency is because the terrorist groups in the North-East are relatively smaller and because their reach does not extend beyond the region.

In a significant message, the US Embassy confirmed that the Dharamshala Reception Centre in Himachal Pradesh had processed over 87 thousand Tibetan refugees between 1980 and 2009 and that 46,620 of them returned to Tibet after a short pilgrimage in India. On an average 2,500 to 3,500 Tibetan refugees arrive every year but most of them return, the cable maintained. Those who stay back are often children who then attend schools run by Tibetans.

More details were made available on Saturday about the meeting that Sonia Gandhi had with Maria Shriver, wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The normally stiff and detached Congress President dropped her guard, said the cable, and chatted away to reveal that her family had opposed her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi; that she resented their stand and went ahead and married him.