O P I N I O N S

Guest Column
Wrong to tell Russia what it can’t do
The US threatening Russia with punishment and its sanctioning highest policy makers is an absurd way to deal with the Ukraine problem diplomatically.
Kanwal Sibal
India should learn several lessons from the Ukrainian crisis. The need to re-balance international relations and reduce the hegemony of the West has become more pressing. Now Russia, a permanent UNSC member equipped with a powerful nuclear deterrent, has become the victim of the West’s bullying instincts.

Touchstones
A lesson well learnt and taught by Khushwant
Khushwant took a perverse delight in perpetuating the myth of a dirty old man, a dedicated tippler, a miser and a fierce iconoclast.
Ira Pande
he was almost 100 years old and in the last few years had started ageing before one’s eyes. His hearing was almost gone and his movements restricted. Yet that mind and that wit remained as sharp as ever.

GROUND ZERO
The Modi juggernaut hits a bump
Rather than a note of unity, the past fortnight saw dissonant voices emanating from within the BJP. That has happened partly because an element of insecurity has crept into Team Modi’s calculation of the NDA achieving Mission 272 plus.
Raj Chengappa
A month is a long time for a General Election. Till last week, the Narendra Modi juggernaut seemed unstoppable. BJP leaders, including patriarch LK Advani, were confident the BJP was going to win its largest tally ever in the Lok Sabha. That meant exceeding the 183 seats the party won in the 1999 General Election.

Guest Column
Wrong to tell Russia what it can’t do
The US threatening Russia with punishment and its sanctioning highest policy makers is an absurd way to deal with the Ukraine problem diplomatically.
Kanwal Sibal

India should learn several lessons from the Ukrainian crisis. The need to re-balance international relations and reduce the hegemony of the West has become more pressing. Now Russia, a permanent UNSC member equipped with a powerful nuclear deterrent, has become the victim of the West’s bullying instincts. Rising countries should build their own political, economic and security networks to sustain a multi-polar world in which the US and EU are unable to wield their enormous financial clout to impose their solutions to problems.

Even huge countries like India and China — together constituting almost 2/5th of humanity — are not considered part of the ‘international community’ when the West decides to speak in its name, unless, of course, they support western policies. In condemning Russian actions in Ukraine, the West has claimed once again that it is speaking on behalf of the ‘international community’, ignoring the position taken by India and China. Russia can be said to be at loggerheads with the West on Ukraine, but not the ‘international community’ as a whole. We need alternative power centres in the world that can make the voice of the ‘international community’ more inclusive.

Russia’s upper house of Parliament has ratified the treaty incorporating Crimea. AFP

Having dominated the globe for centuries a North Atlantic centred view of the world is entrenched in western thinking. The West is unable to shed this outmoded thinking even when the economic power has shifted eastwards and political power has got dispersed with the rise of several non-western countries. While the US remains the world’s strongest power, its financial distress as well as its military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan and political knocks in Libya, Egypt and Syria, demonstrate its increasing inability to shape global outcomes as it wishes. Unless this reality is internalised by the western political class, particularly American, a more cooperative and consensual world order would have difficulty in emerging. Consequently, the West will continue to create crises in various regions in order to assert its global pre-eminence.

The West must recognise the reality that non-western countries cannot be ignored in the conduct of international relations, and that the post-1945 global system that the West wishes to perpetuate by co-opting potential challengers through the process of globalisation, not only of economics but also of western values, has to be replaced by a more equitable system that puts genuine constraints on the West’s tendency to use power arbitrarily, intervene militarily, advocate concepts that justify interference in the internal affairs of other countries and change regimes that it does not like.

That the West always acts responsibly in the interest of peace and stability, unlike non-democratic, authoritarian regimes, and that its vocation to spread democracy and promote respect for human rights is aimed at making the world a better and safer place to live in is a fiction. Europe, especially, claims that it has buried the destructive conflicts of the past and created a new model of shared peace and prosperity.

The Ukraine conflict belies all these claims. The West has been creating conditions for another Cold War in Europe by seeking to strategically weaken an already enfeebled post-Soviet Russia. The Soviet collapse and end of communism had already changed dramatically the balance between Russia and the West. Rather than building cooperative structures in Europe with Russia as an equal partner, the policy has been to dominate Russia’s periphery and exacerbate Russian insecurities by extending Nato and the EU into the Russian heartland of the former Soviet Union.

The US and EU have used the tools of democracy and human rights to destabilise Russia’s relations with countries like Ukraine. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Kosovo referendum, the West-provoked crisis in Georgia-Russia relations, and further afield, regime changes in Iraq, Libya and attempts to do in Syria that have unleashed Islamist forces that heighten the threat to Russia’s northern Caucasus region, Russia was bound to react to the latest US and EU provocation in Ukraine in backing an illegitimate regime change there, with serious consequences for Russia’s legitimate security, economic and ethnic interests. India should be wary about the West’s democracy and human rights agenda because of its use for destructive ends.

Statements by the US and European leaders threatening Russia with punishment and personally sanctioning Russia’s highest policy makers as if Putin is a puppet in their hands is an absurd way to deal with the Ukraine problem diplomatically. Treating as ‘rogues’ those who defy the West’s prescriptions shows unbridled self-righteousness and arrogance. Over-dependence on the West gives it cards it can use when differences arise and should therefore be avoided.

India recognises Russia’s legitimate interests in Ukraine though on principle we support the unity and territorial integrity of countries. Putin has seen our position on Ukraine restrained and objective. This is important for the future of India-Russia ties.

The writer is a former Foreign Secretary of India

Touchstones
A lesson well learnt and taught by Khushwant
Khushwant took a perverse delight in perpetuating the myth of a dirty old man, a dedicated tippler, a miser and a fierce iconoclast.
Ira Pande

he was almost 100 years old and in the last few years had started ageing before one’s eyes. His hearing was almost gone and his movements restricted. Yet that mind and that wit remained as sharp as ever. All of us who loved and admired him knew that he had little time left but even now, it is difficult to believe that he will not be there in his favourite armchair, a ‘modha’ tucked under his legs, a glass of whisky in hand listening to and enjoying the conversation that friends brought to him between 7 and 8 each evening. On his last day on earth, Khushwant Singh still got up long before sunrise, followed the regimen he had charted out decades ago, did his crossword, took a nap and never woke up.

Khushwant Singh has chronicled his life in his writing so there is nothing that any of us can say of his personality that is not known already but it is equally true that he deliberately created a persona for himself immortalised by the logo that illustrated his newspaper columns: a ‘sardar’ with a pen, surrounded by books and a glass of whisky by his side. He took a perverse delight in perpetuating the myth of a dirty old man, a dedicated tippler, a miser and a fierce iconoclast.

Khushwant’s prose was lucid.

The truth is that, contrary to all these self-made portraits, he was as disciplined a writer as I have ever known, a moderate and responsible drinker who loved sharing his evening with friends with a drink to loosen the tongue, who lived an austere — almost Gandhian — life, despite being born into one of Delhi’s most prosperous families and a man who lived by a personal faith that was far more rigorous than an orthodox religion. Above all, he was the most generous man I have ever known: whether it was the help he rendered to aspiring writers or whether it was his quiet philanthropy and support for causes that he cared about. He hated speaking of this publicly because it delighted him that people thought he was a curmudgeon.

I got to know him when he summoned me to his darbar after he read a memoir of my mother that I had written. My publishers had sent it to Kasauli (where he liked spending his summers) and he wrote a very generous account of it in his weekly column. Writers used to kill to be featured there as it was the Indian equivalent of being discussed at an Oprah Winfrey book club. After all, Khushwant’s were the most widely read columns in India, translated into God knows how many Indian languages. So I arrived dutifully at 7 pm at his Sujan Singh Park flat and was ushered in. I am a near-teetotaller but when he said to me, ‘Pour yourself a drink and get one for me,’ I did not dare to say that I had no idea how to open the seal of a bottle of whisky he pointed out to! We got along like a house on fire from that day on and I remained completely smitten by him.

Khushwant was the most wonderful listener I have ever known and since I am a very poor one, I admired this quality in him above all. He encouraged one to unwind and confess and I found that an evening spent with him lightened and clarified my mind. He had the marvellous capacity to go to the heart of a problem and make one confront one’s deepest fears. This quality is probably what made him such a great mentor: he took the time to read, comment and critique one’s work and gave it his fullest attention.

Another quality that he had — and one that I struggle to emulate — is the lucidity of his prose. I remember a conversation once with him when we were discussing the prose styles of Gandhi and Nehru. As children, we were fascinated and seduced by Nehru’s prose: schoolchildren of my generation knew by heart his ‘tryst with destiny’ speech and his last will and testament. Few of us were encouraged to read or memorise Gandhi’s writings because they did not have the drama that came naturally to Nehru. Yet today, Nehru’s writings have lost some of their pull for me and it is to Gandhi’s clear and artless prose that I turn. I will always remember how Khushwant spoke of his love for Gandhi and how he came under Gandhi’s spell from the first time he met him as a schoolboy when Bapu asked him to wear homespun cloth. Apart from Gandhi’s personal food fads and his intolerance of liquor, Khushwant followed every lesson he learnt from Gandhi. This included writing in the idiom of the common man, and leaching himself of every vestige of self-importance. His eyes welled up as he recalled an occasion when Gandhi was on a fast protesting to support the release of fair funds to Pakistan. Gandhi had undertaken this because a few weeks ago, people had protested against his demand before the Indian government. When it became apparent that Gandhi was too weak to go on, the very people who had hurled abuses at him came to beg him to break his fast. ‘Tell me,’ Khushwant asked, ‘can you think of anyone today who would evoke such public feelings?’ He was silent for a while and then spoke, almost as if he was speaking to himself, ‘We have only heard of our prophets, of characters like Jesus or Rama. God knows whether they existed at all. But here was a man who embodied purity of spirit: why should I not place him higher than a god I have never seen?’

As always, Khushwant had taught me a lesson that evening that I will never forget.