Few institutions are given the chance to stand up and be counted by history. Tragically, in the case of Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), it has preferred to score small, rather petty points — especially when it comes to Pakistan. One glaring example is the recent refusal of visas to Punjabi writers from Pakistan. That was followed last week by an MEA official summoning a Pakistani diplomat and demanding the release of 22 Sikh youth detained in a Quetta jail — they had been arrested in Turkey trying to get into Europe, which had pushed them into Iran, which in turn pushed them into Balochistan — and about 300 Indian fishermen languishing in Pakistani jails. It turns out that days before the MEA summons, the Director-General of the South Asia Department in Pakistan’s foreign office, Rashid Salim, had told India’s Charge d’Affaires Sudhir Vyas that Pakistan was soon going to release both the fishermen as well as the Sikhs. About the same time, Subramaniam Swamy, on a visit to Pakistan, had been told the same by Musharraf himself. So why this MEA summons? So that when the fishermen and the Sikhs were released by Pakistan, they could take the full credit for it. Up from the rubble, Iraq is calling The Iraqi crusade is gathering speed, boosted by nations only recently emerged from the backyards of history. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, for too long subject to the autocracy of the Iron Curtain, will henceforth be identified by their launch into the slipstream of US victory. So when the conquistadors come marching into Baghdad, the foot-soldiers will be from Gdansk, Hegyeshalom and Prague. The first is the Polish port city where a strike by the unions in 1980 led by Lech Walesa struck the first blow for perestroika. The second is the last train stop on the Hungarian border, where the concertina wire that divided Eastern Europe from the brighter skies of Austria was one morning in 1989, cut into ribbons. The last, then, is the magnificent capital of the Czech Republic, one of the surviving masterpieces of Baroque architecture. Last week, Prague voted with both feet to join a US-led alliance to unseat the secular dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Op-ed diplomacy and Euro politics A William Safire piece in the New York Times unearths the ‘‘op-ed diplomacy’’ behind last week’s pincer movement across Europe. From the south, Italy, Spain and Portugal, from the east Poland, the Czech republic and Hungary, while Denmark led from the north. Turned out that the Wall Street Journal had spawned the move to get Italy’s Berlusconi to write an article criticising the “overlordship” of France and Germany against the US campaign on Iraq. But Safire also let on that the selection of the triumvirate was not accidental. That the US had been for a while training a thousand Iraqi oppositionists in Hungary, that the departing Czech leader Vaclav Havel (an original signatory to the ‘Charter of 77’ human rights organisation at home during the Cold War) had to be persuaded to sign on the dotted line. The Unbearable lightness of being an MoS The newest MoS for external affairs Vinod Khanna has his hands full — doing nothing. Khanna still hasn’t been given a beat to do. Partly because Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha was in Central Asia, partly because MoS Digvijay Singh has just inherited key portions like the Gulf from Omar Abdullah. Still, Khanna seems to have rattled many by saying that the ‘‘PM himself wanted him in the Foreign Office.’’ Then he told the press that since he was on the PM’s bus to Lahore, he would now hope that President Musharraf took the return bus to Delhi. Did anyone tell Khanna that the bus rides stopped a year ago? And that even if most of the BJP thinks so, Pakistan is not the only country in the world.
