Navtej Sarna

beyond-the-moon-how-space-travel-changes-our-view-of-humanity

Sat Apr 11 17:42:56 IST 2026

Distance lends perspective. Without doubt, the Fortunate Four flying on Artemis II must be getting this perspective as, at the time of writing, they travel to the far side of the moon, further than any man has been before. Without doubt too, they must be thanking the countless stars around them, that at least for 10 days, they were able to leave this miserable world as it commits suicide, murder and mindless destruction, all at once.

From the Artemis window, they would have compared our beautiful blue planet favourably to all else around them, admired the magical view of oceans and land masses, bathed in white swirls. But soon the earth would have appeared smaller, the lines of the continents fainter and increasingly irrelevant. The minuscule proportion of the earth with the endless surrounding vastness would have been quickly driven home.

They must have wondered that if the earth in the universe is much the same as a speck of dust in a desert storm, then what is the brouhaha all about. Where, from that window, are to be seen the lines, some dotted and disputed, that divide nation states, the lines over which men are killing each other? Where are the imperious capitals, the power centres, the palaces and pelf? All that would have been visible to them would have been a blue ball without political or racial fault lines. At that distance it would have been of no import too that men may be born with white, yellow, brown or black skins or some may pray to the east and others to the west.

With that glimpse into a creation, the pettiness of our international politics must become incomprehensible. Why have puny men with small minds and huge egos, vengeful, greedy and morally bankrupt men been allowed untrammelled power to invade nations at will, threaten and execute genocide, kill innocent women and children by the thousands, covet one man’s land or another man’s oil? Who has given them the right to threaten to end ancient civilisations, the wealth and depth of which they are ill-equipped to even comprehend? To pummel into rubble and dust humanity’s heritage, art and culture. Or ethnically cleanse a people from their land where lie the graves of their fathers, rob them of access to revered places of worship, extend borders at will. What heavenly sanction, which obscure edict, gives these men the right to start a war that violates every tenet of international law in the 21st century, and has no reason beyond anger. Or to invent for their actions disingenuous glib narratives every day, to use thuggery and brute force to bomb hospitals, libraries, universities, schools, power houses and bridges.

The Fortunate Four may well wonder where the wise men of the world have gone, those who fought for peace and brotherhood, education and development. They may quickly acquire what Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and one of the 12 men to have walked on the moon, called “an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it”. They may not be able to, as Mitchell wanted, to drag crazed leaders by the “scruff of the neck… a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a b***h.’” But they may rest assured that the dark side of the moon, with apologies to Charles Dickens, is a far, far better place that they go to than they have ever known.

The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.

echoes-of-war-photos-of-minab-school-tragedy-demand-justice

Sat Mar 14 17:01:23 IST 2026

Some photographs become iconic images. Incontrovertible evidence of crime, sworn witnesses to tragedy. In the early days of the US-Israel onslaught on Iran, one such image has already transfixed itself on the global mind. This photograph shows over a 100 graves being dug in the southern Iranian town of Minab, small graves placed in neat, orderly rows—appropriately so. For the bodies they are waiting to receive are also of small schoolgirls, used to dressing neatly for school and sitting in orderly rows.

Israel has denied responsibility in the attack on a functioning primary school that killed over 165 school girls aged between seven and 12. The US says the matter is under investigation; early verifications including one by The New York Times point to a strike by a US precision tomahawk missile on the school compound which was adjacent to an IRGC facility. President Donald Trump has blithely stated, between rounds of golf, that the strike was “done by Iran, because they’re very inaccurate with their munitions, they have no accuracy whatsoever”. Given the callous cynicism that characterises today’s ‘politics of gangster imperialism’ (a description I borrow from a brilliant essay in the London Review of Books), it is amazing that no one has claimed that Iran had hidden a nuclear facility under the school.

But prevarication, dissembling or glib whataboutery—the default resort of the morally lackadaisical—will not work. When the din of battle falls silent, posterity will wipe the dust off the face of truth. This photograph will be recalled whenever there is talk of wanton killing, of flagrant violation of the laws of war, of the waywardness of precision munitions. It will scream the murder of innocence. No amount of power, hubris, wealth or arrogance will be able to withstand its indictment. Quite simply, this bloodstain will not wash.

The past is witness to the power of such photographs. Recall the 1972 photograph of the Napalm Girl taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut. The photo shows Kim Phuc, a nine-year old Vietnamese girl covered with napalm which had been dropped on a civilian village, her clothes torn off, running naked, screaming in pain, arms widespread against the background of a burning village. Front-paged in American newspapers, this photo, to quote the critic Susan Sontag “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. It won the photographer the Pulitzer and, not withstanding some later controversy, became a powerful anti-war symbol.

Or the haunting Migrant Mother, the 1936 photo by Dorothea Lange which shows a woman with her half comatose children during the Great Depression, her lined forehead and pained eyes capturing a range of human emotions from exhaustion to resilience. Or The Afghan Girl, the Steve McCurry photo of Sharbat Gula, whose fear-filled yet determined green eyes staring out of the cover of National Geographic brought home the desperation of Afghan refugees and became a symbol of the injustice that hapless innocents undergo during conflict.

I don’t know what happened to the Migrant Mother. But the Napalm Girl, Kim Phuc, underwent years of medical treatment, got married and had two children. She established a foundation for children in conflict and served as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador. Sharbat Gula, identified years later, faced some social and political censure in conservative circles because of that photo but finally found safe haven in Italy after the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

But Minab’s 165 schoolgirls have no prospect of any future. Their lives were snuffed out by men who were ostensibly bombing Iran to ensure that girls would not have to wear the hijab.

The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.

to-the-rose-garden-of-martyrs-navtej-sarna

Sat Feb 14 11:45:47 IST 2026

Even during my time in Tehran nearly three decades ago, a jagged chasm had opened up between the people and the regime. The revolutionary fervour had paled; resentment with an oppressive cleric regime, clothed in religious righteousness, muscled by a ruthless security system and supported by shadowy financial structures was evident. The invasion of private space, the curtailment of personal freedoms, economic hardship and growing estrangement from the world deeply troubled the people, heirs to a rich and highly sophisticated civilisation.

A close friend observed that these children of the revolution would come out on the streets again but “only when they are ready to die”. My friend is no longer with us but from on high he would have watched his compatriots being shot dead on the streets of Tehran, Karaj, Kermanshah… not by an enemy force, or an occupying power, but by their own guardians.

And yet, as I write, nobody quite knows what is going to happen in Iran.

Will the “loaded and locked” US war machine, now looming over Iran, unleash its spleen on the Ayatollahs? Will Donald Trump, turbo-charged by his machismo for technological blitzkrieg, rain hell on Iran? And what then? Retaliation and counter-retaliation by Iran and Israel? Civil war, ethnic divide and disintegration? Chaos in the world’s crucial cockpit?

Now that US-Iran talks are underway, Trump will likely hold his “armada” as a negotiating threat. Major regional players like the Saudis, Qataris and Turks have been cautioning the US against military intervention. Trump, too, is averse to anything that is not a quick win with a high tom-tom potential: a regional mess in the run-up to the mid-terms cannot be his preferred option.

In any case, there is little hope of a new dawn over Tehran. The regime, though battered by bombs and protests, is too well-entrenched to simply simper away. The protest movement made up of merchants (bazaaris), pensioners and the Gen Z has not yet produced a man for the magical hour. The Pahlavi Prince, exhorting the protestors from his gated, luxurious estate in Maryland, may not have the requisite courage or charisma; the Iranian people, recalling the Shah’s repression, may not relish a monarch, no matter how well disguised. In fact, the hour for regime change may have already passed. If Trump gets a nuclear deal that he can flaunt, and Iran gets to keep its ballistic missiles programme, these protests and the loss of so many precious lives—many in the flower of their youth—may just pass into history.

And the most haunting of all questions: how many people have died? The numbers game is again afoot: the authorities put the figures of those killed at over 3,100, linking most deaths to terrorism, whatever that means. The Wall Street Journal put the numbers variously at 6,000 and 10,000, referencing human rights researchers. The Guardian, a few days earlier, put the figure of the dead at 30,000; Iranian diasporic sources talk of even a higher number. But even in a post-truth world, numbers will ultimately be out: even the dead want to be counted. Already there are calls, including within Iran, for greater transparency about the victims.

Would these deaths have been worth anything in these cynical, venal, morally-bankrupt times? The answer, if one is to keep faith in the human spirit, must remain yes. Iran, where Shiite tradition reveres martyrs, must someday honour these dead. Perhaps by discarding the indignity of the grey body bags and giving them a resting place in that rose garden of martyrs, the Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran’s sprawling cemetery where, among others, lie the martyrs of the revolution and those of the Iran-Iraq war.

The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.

why-is-donald-trump-obsessed-with-buying-greenland

Sat Jan 17 14:43:45 IST 2026

The problem, it seems, is that we have no problems of our own. Or we cannot see them because one cannot see beyond six feet in Delhi. Or we keep trying to brush them under the Persian carpet, where, of course, they have their own problems.

So in Delhi’s drawing rooms, the focus shifts far afield to a virginal Greenland cowering under Trump’s covetous gaze. At one level, I regard that, too, as my problem. Greenland has been on my bucket list—a list that moves as slowly as an old Soviet queue—ever since my first sight from a transatlantic flight of endless vistas of pristine ice, dotted along the coast with brightly coloured cottage-like houses. Now Greenland is less likely to be ticked off that list even as the time to k. the b. comes ever nearer: getting a Schengen visa, though not easy, is a relatively civilised process; with another kind of ICE in full flow, an American visa will require jumping through hoops, including swearing declarations that one is not going to the US to engage in money-laundering, terrorism, prostitution and so on.

But despite three wonderfully voluble dinners since New Year’s Day, nobody—not even Donald Trump—can quite predict what will happen with Greenland. The world—particularly Europe—waits like an anxious teenaged girl, plucking petals off a daisy flower and wondering: Will he, won’t he.

American interest in Greenland has been voiced before: in 1867 when the US acquired Alaska from Russia, in 1946, in 2019 under Trump 1.0 and even last January (which seems an awfully long time ago).Its strategic and commercial importance is undeniable. Arctic warming is opening up the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage, drastically cutting transit times. Russia has a powerful Arctic fleet and claims a long Arctic coastline. China is investing heavily in ports, energy and mining with an eye on Greenland’s 1,000 trillion cubic feet of gas, 90 billion barrels of oil and massive deposits of precious metals and critical minerals.

All these are rational strategic interests whose pursuit does not require a territorial takeover and a strangling of NATO. The US occupied Greenland during World War II following the German occupation of Denmark. A 1951 agreement gives the US virtually complete military access to the territory; Denmark/Greenland are hardly likely to object to greater US military presence now: it is the US that has reduced its earlier 10,000 strong presence to 200 personnel confined to one base.

But in a Trumpian world, rational methods are passe’. Explanations have to be found in irrational impulses and psychological vulnerabilities.

First, Trump, the real estate mogul, likes ownership not tenancy. And he likes big: Ask the 6’3” tall, broad, chunky Maduro. (In Manhattan, the XXL Nike tracksuits worn by Maduro after arrest are flying off the shelves.) So Trump salivates over Greenland on a map, which looks misleadingly the size of Africa on the Mercator projection, and says (as reported in The New Yorker): “Look at the size of this, it is massive, and that should be part of the United States.” By that logic, what about Russia?

Next, Trump, the reality TV host, enjoys playing commander-in-chief. Stopping wars, bombing countries—the tally is seven in one year, “running” places and then watching it, from the safety of the White House situation room, like “a television show…the speed, the violence”. This military porn can be addictive. And, as he recently claimed, no one can stop him except his “own morality… own mind”. Well, so this week the needle is tilting towards He will. Unless Cuba, Mexico, Columbia, Iran… come in the way.

The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.

how-akali-movement-reclaimed-sikh-shrines-and-fought-for-indias-freedom

Sat Dec 20 16:13:30 IST 2025

It was the magical hour at the Golden Temple. The sun was taking its leave discreetly; the early winter twilight was settling in unobtrusively. The kirtan, sung in classical ragas, was floating over the sarovar, the holy pool. Hundreds of pilgrims waited to enter the sanctum sanctorum or sat by the sarovar savouring a moment of peace. It was a time to withdraw, to reflect, perhaps meditate.

This serenity was not always a given. During the persecution of the Sikhs in the 18th century, the gurdwaras (or dharamsals, as they were known) were looked after by the Udasis, who professed the Sikh faith but did not conform to its outward symbols. While many were men of learning, some gave in to vain temptation. They set up their own institutions—deras and akharas—and came to be known as Mahants. With royal patronage during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the coming of the canal irrigation, the estates attached to the gurdwaras became very valuable. Many Mahants began to treat them as personal, even hereditary, possessions and lived licentious lives; the shrines became dens of corruption and vice.

The impetus for restoring the sanctity of the gurdwaras gathered strength in the early 20th century, impelled by the progressive political, religious and social message of the Singh Sabha movement. The 1907 agrarian unrest, the Ghadar Movement, the return of the Sikh soldiers from World War I, and finally the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre all created a landscape of political unrest in Punjab. The shameful honouring of Brigadier-General Dyer by the government appointed Sarbrah (manager) of the Golden Temple incensed the wider Sikh community and highlighted the perfidious linkage between the Mahants and the colonial authorities. The Gurdwara Reform Movement melded into the national freedom struggle.

The Akali reformers chose the path of non-violent resistance, marching in disciplined groups known as jathas to wrest control of the shrines. Their fortitude in the face of police violence earned them the admiration of the nationalist leadership. The brutal beatings of Akali jathas at Guru-Ka-Bagh, the police firings on peaceful protestors at Jaito, the sacrifices at Tarn Taran and Panja Sahib passed into living lore. At Nankana Sahib, the licentious Mahant Narain Das, in tacit connivance with colonial authorities, shot 130 reformers, burning the bodies collectively using kerosene. Mahatma Gandhi, who visited the site, called the horrific episode a “second edition of Dyerism”. Then came the celebrated Keys Affair of 1921. When the government seized the keys of the Toshakhana (treasury) of the Golden Temple, widespread protests broke out, even raising concerns regarding the loyalty of Sikh troops. The government lost nerve and surrendered the keys. Gandhi’s telegram to Baba Kharak Singh, the president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, said it all, “First battle for India’s freedom won. Congratulations.”

The Gurdwara Reform Movement reached its climax with the passage of the Sikh Gurdwaras and Shrines Bill in 1925. Over a period of five years, approximately 30,000 had gone to prison, 400 died and another 2,000 were wounded. To pay tribute to the martyrs of the struggle a new volume titled—Secret and Private Papers of the Akali Movement 1920-25—is now out. These papers, centred on the correspondence of Sir W. Malcolm Hailey, home member of the governor general’s council and later governor of Punjab, were meticulously collected in 1975 by the respected historian, Dr Mohinder Singh. They shed fresh light on devious colonial designs to suppress the Akali Movement and to sow dissension in its ranks. In the 75th year of our republic, this volume is a valuable reminder of the multi-hued nature of India’s freedom struggle.

The writer is the former ambassador to the US and author of the historical novel ‘Crimson Spring’.

iran-parched-reality-from-flowing-streams-to-a-wasteland

Sat Nov 22 17:36:38 IST 2025

My memories of Iran in the nineties tinkle with the sound of water. Of streams running down the slopes of the Alborz mountains above Tehran, fed by the snows of Mount Damavand. Of chinar leaves floating in the water channels that raced along Vali Asr, the long avenue that slopes through the city. Of sipping black tea from thin glasses under the Si-o-se Pol (the bridge of the 33 arches) in Isfahan as the Zayandeh Rud (literally, the life-giving river) flowed past.

But today, northern Iran brings up visions from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

One by one, Iran’s reservoirs are drying up. People walk on the dry bed of the Zayandeh Rud; the tea house under the arches must be bereft of all its charm. The turquoise Lake Urmia, the world’s sixth largest salt-water lake, has dried up to a depth of only half a metre and may soon go the way of the Aral Sea. The nightmarish possibility of having to evacuate the 10 million strong capital looms large.

Located in the dry latitudes, drought is not new in Iran, but is now in its fifth consecutive year. Admittedly, Iran has not done enough to avoid this crisis and its experience should be a cautionary tale for those in India who salivate to bring ‘development’ to fragile ecosystems. There is rampant over-extraction of ground water including through illegal boring; in fact, the subsidence created by this over-extraction now endangers the architectural treasures of Isfahan. Iran’s agricultural practices—famously inefficient—heighten wasteful consumption. Faulty policies, gross mismanagement and poorly built dams further exacerbate the situation.

But undeniably, climate change with steadily rising temperatures has been the trigger for the present dire situation. More than 20 provinces of the country have not had a drop of rain in what is officially the rainy season. Snow cover has decreased by almost 99 per cent nationwide compared to last year, and rainfall is down 89 per cent against long-term averages; in fact there has been a 30 per cent reduction in rainfall over the last five years.

Geopolitics twists matters further. Sanctions hamper Iran’s ability for climate change mitigation by curbing access to international finance and green technologies. Iran is yet to ratify the Paris Agreement of 2015. Its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) pledged a reduction of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions by four per cent by 2030 plus a further eight per cent decrease contingent on removal of US sanctions, and that is nowhere in sight. Iran remains among the top ten emitters of GHG, given its reliance on fossil fuels. The 12-day war with Israel has further damaged the water infrastructure in Iran. In a cynical offer, Benjamin Netanyahu has offered to supply water experts and technologies if the Iranian people take to the streets and effect regime change: this proposal, if there was enough water, would be dead in a cupful.

Belem in Brazil, where the COP30 is in its second week, may be far from Tehran but the issues are all inter-connected. What happens to the Amazon impacts rainfall patterns everywhere. While the indigenous people of the Amazon are protesting in Belem against deforestation, mining and drilling in the lungs of the world, the Iranians are flocking to the mosques, hands raised in prayer.

Neither protest nor prayer are going to help much. Man by his selfishness, his ever-growing greed, his rampant lust to ravage the earth, has angered the gods and they are not listening.

a-cold-war-spy-father-on-indias-tryst-with-destiny

Sat Oct 25 16:18:33 IST 2025

Every once in a while, the archives deliver a nugget. Your columnist came across an essay in The Statesman of August 15, 1947, by a certain H. St. John Bridger Philby, an ICS officer whose son, Kim Philby, born in Punjab on New Year’s Day 1912, would become the iconic Cold War spy. Philby nicknamed his son after the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel; the nickname stuck, as did the spying habit that the two Kims shared.

Philby Sr. spent eight years in Punjab and then decades in the Middle East. A notable scholar, linguist, ornithologist and explorer, he has been described as “a figure of considerable notoriety”. A close adviser to Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia’s first king, Philby converted to Islam, went to Mecca and took the name of Sheikh Abdullah. He also took, as his second wife, a slave girl from Baluchistan presented by the Saudi king.

But India was in his blood. He returned 32 years later, in the tortured summer of 1947, to witness India’s independence, a goal he had long viewed with sympathy. His impressions, recorded in The Statesman essay, show that many questions have not gone away.

For instance, was Partition inevitable? Philby believes so, having anticipated a Pakistan early on. Was the Mountbatten Plan too rushed? Philby, otherwise an inveterate critic of British policy in India, praises the scheme as not “just the best possible one in the difficult circumstances in the great subcontinent” but “as near an ideal solution as the human intellect is capable of devising”. He applauds the energetic march to the transfer of power, monitored through the famed Mountbatten calendar on every desk, showing the countdown to August 15 and sees Mountbatten’s appointment as the first governor general of the dominion of India as evidence of deep admiration for his administrative ability.

Did Indian leaders accept partition because they were, in Nehru’s later words, “tired men”? Philby believes that, “aroused to the realities of the situation by the clash of communal arms in their towns and villages” the leaders saw partition as the only path to immediate independence. But their joy was tempered with regret. “Mr Gandhi and Mr Nehru may be disappointed at the dissipation of their dream of a united India, sovereign and independent, while Mr Jinnah may have similar regrets that his ideal of a united Punjab and a united Bengal has proved equally unattainable. Circumstances have been too strong for them all.”

Philby foreshadows other issues that persist. Our relationship with Britain, about which he was optimistic, has remained a curious but overall positive mix of historical anger and an instinctive comfort based on English language, literature and sport. Incidentally, English, he found, was spoken in 1947 among India’s educated class “with a purity and fluency worthy of commendation”; Indian women, whose presence in public life had increased dramatically, also spoke “English almost as a second mother tongue”. The debate about the value of English in our successful international engagement is not yet over.

Philby found Indian women to be “the best dressed women in the world … in their own lovely inimitable saris and kurtas”; he was less charitable to the men who had “discarded Indian fashions for European garb”. Nevertheless, he predicted that India will turn to pay attention to her own indigenous culture as soon as “the inferiority complex produced by years of subjection has disappeared”. Were Philby to visit us now, he would feel thoroughly vindicated to see us emerging out of the pollution haze in a parade of floral bandi jackets, velvet bandhgalas and paisley sherwanis, green-washing our firecrackers in the hallowed waters of indigenous culture.

And inferiority complex? Pshaw!

india-tiranga-evolution-national-flag-code-india

Sat Aug 30 13:10:33 IST 2025

In the park, a tricolour is tied half way up a fixed flag pole. Fifty metres away, a mammoth flag flutters from a towering flagpole, more than making up for any slight to patriotism caused by the wrong half-masting. Three more flags of varying sizes around the park, including one on the chai-wallah’s cycle, leave no doubt about the colony’s love for the nation.

Even two weeks after Independence Day, the tiranga is everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, in khadi, polyester and paper. On balconies, terraces and gates. On advertisements, vegetable carts, dhabas, shop fronts. Flower pots, electric poles and even an entire Tata Nano are painted in flag colours. A square flag is projected in neon on a commercial block. Our nationalist spirit doesn’t just live in our hearts: it proclaims itself from the rooftops. From one flyover one can spot three mammoth tirangas, supported no doubt by competing RWAs.

Time was when the national flag was not just a beloved but a sacred object. The Flag Code-India of 1950 allowed unrestricted display of the flag by ordinary citizens only on certain days: Republic Day, Independence Day, Mahatma Gandhi Jayanti and the long-forgotten National Week (April 6-13, in memory of the martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh). Strict do’s and don’ts were laid down by the Flag Code, as well as by the underpinning laws: The Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act of 1950 and The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971 regarding the correct use and display of the flag, its approved sizes, its use in military and state funerals, its entire protocol.

But times change. A liberalising economy, technological advances in media and growing confidence changed the culture of our nationalism. The flag could no longer be straitjacketed by state control. Stylised versions were popularised by the Mera Bharat Mahan series and modern takes of Jana Gana Mana and Vande Matharam; it appeared on the cheeks of cricket fans and Sachin Tendulkar famously sported it on his helmet.

Parallel to these trends, a legal campaign to free the flag was launched by the businessman-politician Naveen Jindal. The Supreme Court finally held in 2004 that flying the national flag was a fundamental right, part of the right of speech and expression. Anticipating that judgment, the government had issued a liberalised Flag Code in 2002, the major change being that all citizens could fly the flag when they wanted. Further amendments to the Code and the underlying laws followed: the flag could fly day and night; it could be worn as part of a costume but not below the waist; and it was not mandatory to make flags of khadi alone, polyester was kosher.

So far so good, but here’s the rub: the fundamental right is not unfettered. The flag has to be flown with due respect and dignity. The laws which make disrespect of the flag punishable are still extant. Yet disrespect abounds: flags are heaped by sellers on the pavements; at a paan shop, the saffron is dipping towards the ground; at a show, a dancer holds it upside down. National flags wilt and fray in the rain, they fade in the sharp sun. Three-wheelers sport not one but two huge tricolours; even the liberal Flag Code has a restricted list of those who can fly it on their cars, leave alone three-wheelers. A scooter has the tricolour draped across its front panel. The production is inconsistent, the kesari often a blunt orange, the India green becomes lime green, the proportion not the prescribed 3:2, and so on.

Freedom is beginning to dissolve into disregard and in the case of the national flag, that simply cannot be allowed to happen.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

bombay-high-court-gaza-petition-ruling-foreign-policy-humanity

Sat Aug 02 14:57:27 IST 2025

Alice, if she had wandered into our wonderland, would have found things getting “curiouser and curiouser”, particularly at the Honourable Bombay High Court. Deploying logic that some may call blinkered, the court peremptorily dismissed a petition by Indian citizens—their political affiliations are immaterial to my point—challenging Mumbai Police’s refusal to allow a protest against the unfolding tragedy in Gaza.

Calling the petitioners short-sighted, the court, in reported oral observations, then blamed them for looking too far: Gaza was thousands of miles away and should not concern them. Instead, the petitioners were advised to protest local causes such as garbage disposal, illegal parking and blocked drainage. In the honourable court’s wisdom, that would be patriotic. By implication, it is unpatriotic to protest against the repeated mass displacement of two million people, the killing of 60,000 civilians, the drip-feeding of humanitarian aid, the cynical cackle of mercenaries shooting at hungry children, near-famine conditions, the bulldozing of homes, hospitals and heritage.

Would the court where Bal Gangadhar Tilak was tried for sedition consider me unpatriotic if I simply want to be true to India’s essence, to just be human? If I want to retain my belief that humanity is indivisible and stretches across borders, ethnicities and religions? If I want to never forget my inherited pain of being colonised and occupied, of being beaten by imperial lathis, of being butchered by Dyer’s troops in Jallianwala Bagh, of being starved during the Bengal famine? If I want to hold close the memories handed down by my parents’ generation, memories of forced migration under looming violence, of loss of home and hearth, of becoming refugees overnight; in short, of being ethnically cleansed in the cause of partition?

Those memories are embedded in our national consciousness and if our hearts have not become mechanical calculators of profit and loss but are still pulsating founts of blood and emotion, then to protest against the starvation of Gaza’s children is natural. To give priority to my problems of illegal parking and garbage disposal over that apocalyptic tragedy would be truly short-sighted, and an affront to human dignity.

For that matter, it would also go against India’s long-term interests, our democratic credentials, our global ambitions: you cannot play a role in world affairs if your gaze does not extend beyond your navel. Foreign policy—it needs to be clarified since the honourable court would rather that citizens leave such matters to the foreign ministry—is not made in a vacuum, particularly in a democracy; domestic voices and concerns shape a country’s stances on foreign affairs. Protests reflect political opinions, and they matter: our freedom movement was one long protest.

India’s foreign policy has internationalist roots and cherishes the concept of unity of mankind: vasudhaiva kutumbakam. India pronounced on international issues even before attaining her own freedom, confident of her moral authority, smelted in our nonviolent freedom struggle. Our credibility enabled us to play a critical role in the crises in Indochina, Korea and Congo as well as in multiple UN peacekeeping operations. This credibility was earned not by worrying about our blocked drainage systems alone, important as they always are, but by taking positions on matters which were not only about ourselves, matters that impacted mankind at large—racism wherever it existed, colonialism in Asia and Africa, apartheid in South Africa. True that the world has changed, and relationships have evolved, but hopefully not so much that Indian citizens cannot even express their anguish.

We need not send out to know “for whom the bells toll” in Gaza. If we remain silent, the next time they may toll for us.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

tuvalu-a-sinking-island-nation

Sat Jul 05 11:11:16 IST 2025

These are times when the mind struggles to make sense of things. The old measures are discarded, and the new ones unacceptable. Humanity and decency cower in the corner, arrogance and brute strength play centre stage. Wealth is flung in your face so hard it hurts, empathy is so 20th century: images of uncaring billionaires in their slinkiest and blingiest in Venice compete with those of miserable children in Gaza begging for biscuits under fire.

At such times the mind escapes to faraway places, such as the island nation of Tuvalu. Possibly because I have a story: I once knew a man who knew a man from Tuvalu who had given himself the name “I Lost my Heart in San Francisco.” All of it, passport name. Since then, I see Tuvalu as an idyllic heaven where charming people lead simple lives, where guitar sounds mingle with the roar of azure oceans, where a thousand palm fronds are silhouetted against a setting sun.

Except that even Tuvalu is sinking. Inch by inch the waters are rising around its nine coral atolls; the nation was only six-and-a-half feet above water to start with. In the worst-case scenario—and given the state of the world, I only think of the worst—90 per cent of the main atoll of Funafuti that houses 65 per cent of the population will be underwater by 2050. Tuvalu’s foreign minister had sent a powerful video message to COP26 in 2021 standing thigh-high in water in suit and tie to underline the immediacy of rising sea levels due to global warming. In 2009, the Maldives had made a similar point by holding a cabinet meeting underwater; Marshall Islands and Kiribati are the two other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) that face similar imminent threats in the Pacific where sea-levels have been rising two to three times faster than the global average.

But even before the disappearance of these paradisiacal places, there are threats that would make them uninhabitable. Heightened wave and storm activity are creating challenges of inaccessibility, scarcity of drinking water, degraded farmlands and vector borne diseases. Little wonder then that the SIDS, who have been the least responsible for global carbon emissions, have been battling for attention and climate funding from the tight-fisted developed nations, funding that would help them erect sea walls, raise the ground surface and install desalination plants.

But the battle goes beyond the physical. International law needs to evolve to encompass climate-related changes. What happens to a state’s sovereignty if it goes underwater, its rights over its resources, its membership of UN bodies, its people, culture and heritage? The SIDS have long argued for, and the International Law Commission has reaffirmed in a recent report, the principle of continued statehood: every state has a continuing right to its existence, territorial integrity, self-determination for its people and protection of their human rights. The report also recognises the sanctity of a state’s maritime zones notwithstanding changes in climate-related changes to coastlines.

Even as international legal mechanisms evolve to handle new realities, international cooperation is essential. Australia, in an exemplary good neighbourly gesture, will grant permanent residence to 280 Tuvaluans every year; nearly a third of Tuvalu’s population of 11,000 has put in applications. Tuvalu wants the cap of 280 because it fears brain drain, a position that underlines the spirit of resilience of these islanders: nobody is giving up, despite the apathy of uncaring powers who daily demote the agenda of climate change.

Mr San Francisco may have lost his heart to a Californian beauty, but he will hold on to his land to the last.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.