Canada calling

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien arrives in New Delhi later this week and so what if he8217;s perceived as a sort of lame duck back ho...

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien arrives in New Delhi later this week and so what if he8217;s perceived as a sort of lame duck back home. With Chretien promising to retire in February, a succession race within his Liberal Party has Finance Minister Paul Martin leading.

The Canadian press is already full of Chretien waking up at the APEC meeting in Bangkok on Monday morning and finding Martin8217;s face plastered on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, with the headline 8216;8216;Chretien8217;s political heir aspires to take on the world.8217;8217; Asked by a reporter what he thought, Chretien8217;s cryptic reply was, 8216;8216;Bravo.8217;8217;

Now all eyes will be on Pierre Trudeau8217;s political disciple, to see whether or not he repeats in New Delhi the advice he gave Pakistan8217;s General Pervez Musharraf in Ottawa in September. Chretien told Musharraf Canada was concerned 8216;8216;with the nuclear weapons programmes of both India and Pakistan as they diminish international security8217;8217;. Musharraf cheekily thanked Canada for helping build the Karachi nuclear plant. If the Canadians had more humour, perhaps Minister of State Vinod Khanna could have done the same for the Candu reactors. Both Khanna and Chretien are due to make speeches at the inauguration of the Canadian consulate in Chandigarh on October 25.

New Delhi8217;s agreed to accede to the special request on Diwali as well as to a trip by Chretien to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Clearly the Chretien tour is a concession to the large Sikh community back in Canada. Of that country8217;s 32 million people, one million are of India origin, many of them Sikh.

Dawn of the Arthurian era

British High Commissioner Michael Arthur seems to have decided to junk his high table and go see India in its many villages 8212; where, according to Mahatma Gandhi, it really resides. And so Arthur took a break from economic issues at the Foreign Office in London this summer to take a train trip across India, some of it second class.

Besides Delhi and Mumbai, he went to Mussoorie, when he spent a week learning Hindi. He also went southwards to Hyderabad and Bangalore and on to Raichur in Karnataka, to Iradegera village near Deodurg taluka.

Samuha, an NGO that specialises in village development, put him up for a couple of nights in the home of Balanandappa, Gundappa and their 14-year-old daughter Devamma. Balanandappa later told a journalist they found the Englishman to be a simple fellow, with no fuss. For example, when they made his bed inside the hut and went up to sleep on the roof, they found the next morning that he had brought his mattress to the roof as well.

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Arthur is likely to preside over a number of changes in the bilateral relationship. Trade is already booming at 16 per cent annual growth. But his first test comes with the visit of Charles, the future king, later this month. Perhaps the new high commissioner could read up the files on the visit of Queen Elizabeth II some six years ago, to get a sense of what diplomacy is not about.

Pow-wow with Powell

The choice of Minister of State Vinod Khanna as India8217;s representative at the Madrid donor8217;s conference on Iraq later this week seems to be a compromise between Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the Foreign Office. For the longest time the MEA refused to take a position on sending anyone at all, saying it would 8216;8216;first see8217;8217; how the US-sponsored resolution on Iraq fared at the Security Council.

When the resolution was passed unanimously, the first reaction was to send a secretary-level officer. Then the messages began to come in from Washington. Since Secretary of State Colin Powell was going to attend, what was India going to do?

It was none other than the prime minister himself who decided participation be upgraded to the political level and Khanna be sent. So while Indian industry, led by FICCI, will participate in the business initiative on the margins of the conference, Secretary R.M. Abhyankar will be fielded on October 23 for the officials meet. Khanna will lead India at the ministerial the day after. Incidentally, Khanna and Powell have already met once 8212; at yet another Iraq reconstruction 8216;8216;spirit of Davos8217;8217; meeting in Amman, Jordan, in June.

Moonshine

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The flight of the Chinese astronaut last week had some Russia hands in New Delhi returning to the old Soviet joke: Premier Alexei Kosygin wakes up General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev from his stupor one Kremlin afternoon and says, 8216;8216;Comrade, I have news for you, both good and bad!8217;8217;

Okay Comrade, says Brezhnev, give me the bad news first. 8216;8216;The Chinese have sent a man to the moon,8217;8217; says Kosygin, 8216;8216;now I will give you the good news. All the Chinese are on the moon. They stood one upon the other and reached there.8217;8217;