Tumhari Amrita, unki Madeleine

By seven that evening, everything that has to be said about the bombs has been repeated from Washington, London and Beijing. Every calculation, including how many toilets you can build for the cost of one bomb, has been done. Except Kashmir. This is the new angle in search of a new language from the P5. Would they Kashmir or would they not? Diplomats negotiating the draft communique don’t talk. Their mobiles are switched off. There is a gag order.

A gagged diplomat, like a gagged journalist, does not exist. The P5 meeting is scheduled for six in the evening. The phone rings at seven. A first draft of the communique is leaked. It terms Kashmir the "root cause" of the trouble and asks both sides to refrain from provocative acts on the Line of Control (LOC). People run around likeheadless chickens asking what LOC means even as their countries condemn India and Pakistan. Western journalists ask how the Indian and Pakistani ambassadors could even speak to each other, as they were that morning. Dammit, we are the same people. At times like this you feel neither pro-this nor anti-that. You just feel bad. We, people in both countries, deserve better.

The clock stands past midnight in Delhi when the final version emerges.

Kashmir is still the "root cause" but the references to the LOC let loose in the corridors have vanished. During the pandemonium diplomats from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were seen consulting the same sources about what was being said about them inside the chambers where the P5 attempted to rewrite their history. It makes you wonder why we can’t sit across a table and talk.

When you have been staking out (which is journalese for hanging about outside a meeting room for upto 12 hours), hungry, cold and overcome with self-pity, and when a colleague or diplomatwalks up saying, "Now tell me about Kashmir," you just spin. In recent weeks, I’m having a ball spinning out crash courses on India-Pakistan relations. The latest version includes some lines from Tumhari Amrita.

Madeleine Albright holds her press conference very late that night. The travelling Washington press gets to ask most of the questions. They stick to the script. Otherwise, no trip next time. The questions give Albright a chance to dump on India and to a lesser extent on Pakistan in a language that shocks. The P5 will not allow countries to bully and break international laws, she says. A few hundred kilometres away, same time, same continent, the Yugoslav President sends in troops to kill Albanians in Kosovo.

A colleague’s hand is up from start to finish. She never gets to ask her question about Israel. No luck for the Indian Express either. I’d have liked to ask what madam thought about this Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky thing.