Crossing boundaries

The maulvi of Mandvi, Baroda, and his wife, alias the parents of Irfan Pathan, are off to Lahore to watch their young son and India8217;s s...

The maulvi of Mandvi, Baroda, and his wife, alias the parents of Irfan Pathan, are off to Lahore to watch their young son and India8217;s swinging sensation, perform at the next Test on April 5. Poster-boy Pathan, still so cutely getting over the cross-border adulation, has clearly become the unwritten antidote to those horrendous stories of Zaheera Sheikh, Bilquis Lateef and Best Bakery that Gujarat has become a recent synonym of. Pathan will now also learn at the feet of pace greats like Wasim Akram and Imran Khan, among the best and brightest of them all.

Other not-so high-profile visitors to Lahore are expected to be the wives of the cricketers themselves, of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. Perhaps they were prohibited from joining their mates at the high-tension one-dayers. But now that life has settled into a more predictable rhythm, it is rumoured that Virender Sehwag8217;s fiancee will cross the border too. If only all the crickethood could make a dent in the unvarying predictability of Foreign Office bureaucracies. At the Human Rights Conference in Geneva late last week for example, Pakistan threw allegations of human rights abuses in Kashmir at India with such pre-January 6 vehemence that New Delhi was forced to invoke the right of reply. What a yawn. Lahore8217;s so much more interesting than Geneva.

Island politics

Sri Lanka goes to the polls on April 2 and despite the fact that Ranil Wickeramasinghe8217;s UNP was instrumental in bringing the 19-year-old civil war to an end two years ago, it is President Kumaratunga8217;s Freedom Alliance that is ahead in opinion polls. Perhaps Ranil8217;s threat, that Sri Lanka may return to its bad old days if the UNP was not voted to power, seems to have had the effect of scaring a nation exhausted with war. Perhaps it8217;s just plain, ol8217; politics. Whatever the result, LTTE death squads are out for Karuna, the commander in the East who dared to challenge the fief of Prabhakaran. That8217;s a continuing story that rivals any other in the world.

Even in the late 8217;80s, Commander Karuna in his Batticaloa kingdom would often challenge IPKF commanders. 8216;8216;You8217;ll never get me,8217;8217; he would taunt them in Tamil over the wireless. He was right. Always the master strategist, it was Karuna who led the major campaigns of the LTTE, while Prabhakaran hid in a cave. Meanwhile, a couple of years ago, Karuna told an Indian journalist that he 8216;8216;admired and respected8217;8217; both Mahatma Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose. The legend lives.

Bullet vs Ballot

HURRIYAT rebels are ganging up in Kashmir to boycott the polls, despite promises made by Hurriyat chief Moulvi Ansari to Deputy PM L K Advani. Fearing for their lives, the pro-independence Yasin Malik, the pro-Pakistani Syed Ali Geelani as well as Sajjad Lone of the People8217;s Conference have decided to campaign against the 8216;8216;fraudulent8217;8217; Lok Sabha elections. In this atmosphere of peace with Pakistan, the militant with the gun seems to have more power over Kashmiri leaders than President Musharraf8217;s January call to end violence and hostility.

Still, Islamabad hasn8217;t given up hope. Pakistan High Commissioner to India Aziz Khan invited both Hurriyat factions to long sessions with him last week on the eve of Pakistan8217;s National Day celebrations on March 23. Khan is believed to have persuaded Geelani, whose survival is said to be singularly dependent on Pakistani handouts, that he must, for the time being, forsake the idea of floating an independent political party on the eve of the polls. No wonder Geelani, consigned to a side sofa at the National Day party, was sullen and grumbling through the course of the evening.

Helping hand

Foreign Secretary Shashank is off to Berlin to attend a donors conference for Afghanistan where India will announce another aid package towards 28 billion that Kabul has estimated it will need over the next five years. In December 2001, the world gathered at Bonn to elaborate the political agenda for Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, in January 2002 they met in Tokyo to put together a reconstruction effort. It is in the German capital that the political and economic instincts of the international community will now hopefully converge. US Secretary of State Colin Powell will be there, as will British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

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India has ended up giving about 270 million in aid over the last couple of years, focussing on infrastructure such as the Zaranj-Delaram road, rebuilding the Habibia school for girls in Kabul and training some police, among a score of other projects. But New Delhi carefully stays out of other controversial projects such as training Army personnel, a prerogative of the US Army.