O P I N I O N S

GUEST COLUMN
Anti-Lanka vote was a bad idea
India has ended up looking opportunistic and unprincipled, a victim of its internal political wranglings, with a government in New Delhi not fully in control of foreign policy.
Kanwal Sibal
India has once again joined the US and other western countries to censure Sri Lanka at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva on the Tamil issue. This is objectionable on many counts. For many years we have fought our own battles with the earlier incarnation of the UNHRC on the issue of human rights violations of the Kashmiris at the instance of Pakistan.

Touchstones
In spring of fun, looking for tolerance
Spring festivals are an occasion when all social norms are put on hold and you can let your hair down. I wonder whether by sanitising these traditions to the point of prudery, we have also lost our capacity to accept the world with all its madness.
Ira Pande
‘Beware the Ides of March', Julius Caesar was told, and from the events that have unfolded in India recently, it seems as if they portend all kinds of upheavals here as well. The Spring Equinox, March 21, is also the only other day (apart from the Autumn Equinox, September 21) when the sun is positioned directly over the equator and days and nights in both hemispheres are equal.

GROUND ZERO
The mother of all misjudgements
The US-led coalition forces came up with no evidence of the cache of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the supposed cause of the war. Yet, they have left the country in no better condition than when they invaded it.
Raj Chengappa
First there was the big lie. Ten years ago, on March 17, then US President George Bush warned the world and issued an ultimatum to then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, stating, “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfil their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.... Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations — and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defence, it is suicide.

GUEST COLUMN
Anti-Lanka vote was a bad idea
India has ended up looking opportunistic and unprincipled, a victim of its internal political wranglings, with a government in New Delhi not fully in control of foreign policy.
Kanwal Sibal

India has once again joined the US and other western countries to censure Sri Lanka at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva on the Tamil issue. This is objectionable on many counts.

For many years we have fought our own battles with the earlier incarnation of the UNHRC on the issue of human rights violations of the Kashmiris at the instance of Pakistan. Organisations like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the very same that are exposing Sri Lanka to ignominy at Geneva, targeted us relentlessly in the past as delinquents. The US played an encouraging role in this, with the State Department bruising us in its own rights annual reports. We should not have forgotten our own experience so quickly and made common cause with these countries and organisations so readily.

We have all along opposed using human rights as a political instrument to "name and shame" those countries considered adversaries and shield friendly countries with a deplorable rights record from denigration. We have favoured dealing with such sensitive issues bilaterally, with a dialogue oriented rather than a denunciatory approach. We have therefore voted against country-specific resolutions as a matter of principle — until last year when we voted against Sri Lanka.

Protesters outside the Indian High Commission in Colombo. Reuters

Our stakes in Sri Lanka are far higher than those of the US. The latter's human rights activism in our neighbourhood is problematic, especially as it reduces our diplomatic room for manoeuvre and forces us to adopt positions that we may not consider opportune because, more than the US, we have a balance a whole host of complex factors and challenges. Such extra-regional initiatives only generate policy tensions for us. Our strategic partnership with the US requires that it defers to our priorities and interests in our neighbourhood, rather than force us into uncomfortable positioning. India should have an independent policy, at least in our neighbourhood, rather than be forced to follow the US lead.

This does not mean that we have to condone Sri Lanka's failure on reconciliation and accountability issues, implementation of the recommendations of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission and conducting an independent and credible investigation into allegations of violations of international human rights law. But we should deal with these issues bilaterally with Sri Lanka, and as forcefully as required. We should not outsource such responsibility to others, acknowledging in the process the limitations of our clout with our neighbours. We will count even less with our neighbours if we do that.

If we have been buffetted by external pressure on our diplomacy at the UNHRC, our position there has suffered even more because of internal pressure from the DMK. Having voted in favour of an anti-Sri Lankan resolution last year, we couldn't have changed that position this year without progress by Sri Lanka on pending political and human rights issues. However, to balance an unfriendly blow to Sri Lanka in which we would be participating, we tried initially to soften the provisions of the US prompted resolution in order to make them less intrusive and more respectful of Sri Lankan sovereignty, consistent with our principled position on such matters. But as DMK pressure increased we seem to have stepped back from such efforts and asked the Sri Lankan Government to negotiate with the US directly.

When the DMK upped the ante by breaking away from the UPA, the panic-stricken government made a volte-face and sought to harden the very resolution against Sri Lanka that we had sought to soften to begin with. We made a last-ditch effort to propose amendments to that effect, which the US turned down for fear of narrowing the support for a tougher resolution. Ironically, this has made the US look moderate and India as baying for more Sri Lankan blood. India ended up looking opportunistic and unprincipled, a victim of its internal political wranglings, with a government in New Delhi not fully in control of foreign policy. The maturity and steadiness of our diplomacy gets questioned by such antics.

We should accept that India's foreign policy should reflect domestic sentiments. The importance of public opinion cannot be disregarded, but we have seen in the case of many democratic countries that foreign policy decisions get taken even when vocal sections of society are against because larger national interests dictate a particular course of action, however unpopular temporarily. Our foreign policy towards Sri Lanka cannot be dictated by local sentiment in Tamil Nadu, however legitimate in some respects the anguish of our Tamil population over happenings in Sri Lanka. We have to differentiate between domestic sentiment at large and strong regional sentiment, especially if it is hijacked by extremists talking loosely of genocide four years after military operations have ended.

— The writer is a former Foreign Secretary of India

Touchstones
In spring of fun, looking for tolerance
Spring festivals are an occasion when all social norms are put on hold and you can let your hair down. I wonder whether by sanitising these traditions to the point of prudery, we have also lost our capacity to accept the world with all its madness.
Ira Pande

‘Beware the Ides of March', Julius Caesar was told, and from the events that have unfolded in India recently, it seems as if they portend all kinds of upheavals here as well. The Spring Equinox, March 21, is also the only other day (apart from the Autumn Equinox, September 21) when the sun is positioned directly over the equator and days and nights in both hemispheres are equal.

In the pastoral calendar, spring is the time for regeneration and sowing, just as autumn is the season for fruitfulness and harvests. Navroz for Parsis, Holi for Hindus and Sikhs, Easter for Christians - all these come one after another in spring. In Kumaon, for almost a month before Holi, informal concerts are held where bands of 'holiyars' sing the traditional songs of spring. Men and women have separate 'Holi baithaks' and as children we were allowed to peep into the 'men only' baithaks, where bawdy poems and jokes were aimed at each other, all in the spirit of 'Bura na mano, Holi hai!' Later, in the university, lists were surreptitiously posted on our hostel notice boards when girls were singled out by boys for some 'titles'. It was all innocent fun and even a bit of vulgarity and bawdiness was tolerated without feeling as if one was being sexually harassed.

The Lathmar Holi festival at Nandji Temple in Nandgaon on Friday. AFP

Traditionally, spring is celebrated in various ways all over the world and all such celebrations focus on some aspect of this once-in-a year-equality between opposite halves. In the Christian tradition, such a celebration was called the Feast of Fools and a Lord of Misrule was crowned for the day as its king, which gave everyone the licence to behave out of character. Even today, during a carnival, a tradition popular all over the Latin world, people come out on to the streets, dressed anyhow, drink, sing lustily and dance with total strangers. It is an occasion when all social norms are put on hold and you can literally let your hair down. I sometimes wonder whether by sanitising these traditions to the point of prudery, we have also lost our capacity to accept the world with all its madness in a spirit of tolerance.

I bring this up because somewhere we have all lost our sense of tolerating seasonal silliness. Political correctness and what is wrongly called 'secularism' has made it almost impossible now to poke fun at each other. Mind you, I am not defending stalking, voyeurism and rape but merely speaking up for a tradition where everyone - whether high or low - embraced each other even as they smeared each other with vile colours and gave 'gaalis' to the beat of a drum. 'Hasya kavi sammelans', held around Holi, are fun occasions where eminent poets read out silly verse. In a related festive spirit, women get their own back by playing 'lath-maar' Holi, when they beat men with sticks.

Stripped of this traditional mood, Holi is now mostly an excuse to get drunk and be a public nuisance to all on the roads. No sensible person dares to venture out and visit a friend in another part of the town on Holi because chances are you will be pelted with water balloons, forcibly stopped and subjected to groping hands (if you are a woman) or to rough smearing of insoluble paint and nasty stuff (if you are a man) before you can proceed. It is as if the collective frustration of the whole year is waiting to be offloaded on innocent passers-by. This was the very purpose that was sought to be diffused in the original festival but it is now acquiring an ugliness that is almost dangerous.

It seems to me that tolerance, which is the essence of a secular tradition, has become a national casualty. Whether it is politics, entertainment, literature or simple festivals - we have lost our capacity to allow another way of thinking or behaving. Not a day passes by without someone or the other stomping off to a 'kop bhavan' to sulk. Just the other day, I received an invitation to attend a seminar on Dara Shikoh and the Sufi tradition that had some very interesting speakers. A play was also to be staged when suddenly, the programme was altered because someone took umbrage at the content of the play and it had to be taken off the programme. The irony is that Dara Shikoh is the most tolerant of all historical personalities and Sufism the most liberal of all faiths practised in this land. To make even that fact into a contested territory takes my breath away.

Shall we ever see a return to those days when people of all faiths respected each other and gave a wide margin to their individual beliefs and religious practices? As long as our politicians and academics continue to demarcate more and more territories as 'no-go' areas, I am afraid this may never happen. In a country that has always prided itself on a multicultural polity and the coexistence of every religious faith, we must remain ever vigilant against a single way of 'good' behaviour. So here is a happy Holi to all my readers! May we all pelt each other with nothing more harmful than funny verse and abeer-gulal.