The Simla heat

Meanwhile, it clearly looks as if Singh’s heart belongs to the developing world. After his first visit to Nepal on June 4-5, Singh is going to Oman and the UAE from June 10. And while Singh meets all the African and Arab envoys accredited to India on Wednesday, Dixit would likely be giving tea and cashews to the major neoconservative figure in the Bush administration, Douglas Feith.

Statesman Vajpayee

The India-Pakistan relationship continues to resonate with gentle irony. The BJP government’s tenure was marked with events like Kargil, the attack on Parliament, the eyeball to eyeball mobilisation on the border—as well as the Lahore bus ride, the pathbreaking Islamabad summit and the overwhelmingly successful cricket series. So when President Musharraf called former PM Vajpayee late in the evening on Monday, the two leaders had naturally lots to talk about. More than anyone else, these two had ridden the roller-coaster of high emotion these last six years. Not surprisingly, the conversation lasted 15 minutes.

Musharraf began by congratulating Vajpayee for his statesmanlike vision and his ability to put country before party. Then the Pakistani president began to voice concern about a possible shift in the new government’s position about the relationship, such as on the Simla agreement. But that had happened more than 30 years ago, Musharraf said unhappily, and many other agreements, including the Lahore declaration and the Islamabad joint statement had since been signed. Was India repudiating all this, he wanted to know? Vajpayee reassured him that that wasn’t the case. The dialogue process, he said, would go on.

League of four

Apart from nuance correcting policy issues, the Manmohan Singh government has its hands full of the Big Four appointments it needs to make very soon — and that doesn’t include the choice of new Foreign Secretary towards the end of July. Interestingly, if the new government brings about its 58 years retirement rule immediately, nearly 25 officers in the IFS will compulsorily retire, leaving a huge vacuum at the top.

As for the Big Four, by a stroke of coincidence, all the top jobs in Washington, London and New York have fallen vacant, while Moscow follows suit in August when former Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath returns home. The name of N K Singh, member of the Planning Commission, was doing the rounds for the post in Washington in the last government. As for the new one, mum’s the word so far.

Culture club

Even as the Dalai Lama continues to be feted worldwide, a close aide of the Tibetan leader and his representative in Delhi, Tashi Wangdi, represented the Tibetan government-in-exile at the inaugural ceremony of Taiwanese president Chen shui-bian in the third week of May. Meanwhile, a Taiwanese delegation from the Taiwan-Tibet Exchange Fund, a government-sponsored NGO, has been visiting Dharamsala to sponsor cultural and religious activities of the Tibetan community.

While there has been no official comment by the Chinese government on these symbolic gestures on the part of both the Tibetans and the Taiwanese, needless to say Beijing has always dismissed all attempts by the Dalai Lama to equate Lhasa with the ‘‘one country-two systems’’ approach it has allowed Hong Kong and Taiwan to adopt.

Beijing has now issued a White paper on the status of Tibet, after a decade. This one talks about the great leaps forward the Tibetan people have made since 1959 in shedding their ‘‘feudal and serf-like’’ mentality — and offers little hope for the Dalai Lama’s return to his promised land.