Navtej Sarna

international-rules-of-engagement-are-no-longer-sacrosanct

Sat Mar 15 11:16:41 IST 2025

Several narratives have emerged from the Donald Trump-Volodymyr Zelensky-J.D. Vance dust-up in the Oval office, the most disturbing being the opinion that “Zelensky invited it”. To my mind, this is the foreign affairs equivalent of the despicable view that women invite rape by dressing provocatively.

Another specious argument would have us believe that Zelensky didn’t “read the room”, that his inflated sense of self, pumped up by global attention over the last three years, led him astray. He should have learnt from Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, who had deflected difficult situations in the Oval Office just before his meeting. He should have been suitably deferential, smiled ingratiatingly, flattered Trump and licked a couple of shoes. And, of course, he should have bent his knee instead of aiming it at Vance’s sensitive zone.

Both narratives miss the point. They presume that the fundamentals of diplomatic dealing are still in place, or only in temporary abeyance. They believe that a judicial mix of personal charm, dutiful deference and polite public posturing will still carry the day, that if only Zelensky had worn a suit, preferably American cut, and said “thank you” at the beginning of every sentence, Trump would have behaved rationally and read his own talking points and not Putin’s.

But we ignore what Jeeves would have called the psychology of the individual. When the killer is out on the heath he does not care about the fall of your trousers. You can lick a bully’s double-soled boots and he can kick you in the teeth with the same gleaming toe-cap. The spat had nothing to do with the fundamental issues of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and everything to do with the ‘deal’; in a recent 27 second video clip, Trump used the word ‘deal’ seven times—yes, I counted. And every time Zelensky’s references to security assurances cast a shadow on that deal, Trump and Vance went for the jugular. It was clear that what mattered was not sovereignty, not dignity, not strategy or even security, but the gigantic quantities of rare earths that lie in Ukrainian soil. The thinly disguised intention was simply to grab this new-age treasure and throw the putrefying remains of decency, diplomacy and democracy in the ugly pit left behind. And Zelensky meanwhile could just kowtow.

The world is willy-nilly having to adjust to the new truth: international rules of engagement are no longer sacrosanct. The Europeans are regrouping, Vladimir Putin has settled down to the show with his family-sized bowl of popcorn and Xi Jinping is bracing with coiled strength for what the future may bring; others are hoping to ride out the storm by keeping their heads down. Only time will decide the winners, or even the survivors.

But one man deserves our fulsome admiration: Lech Wałęsa. This electrician from Gdansk shipyard-turned Solidarity leader who ended up as president of democratic Poland expressed his unvarnished “horror and distaste” at Trump’s treatment of Zelensky. In an open letter, co-signed by several democracy activists, including Solidarity heroes Bogdan Lis and Adam Michnik, he termed the repeated demands for Zelensky’s gratitude “insulting” and likened the Trump-Vance whip-lashing to interrogations by communist-era security services.

Wałęsa should know something about resistance. Solidarity, inspired by Gandhian methods of civil resistance, brought the Soviet-backed communist regime to its knees. In fact, when Solidarity, with Wałęsa at the head, swept back into the Polish parliament in 1989, the Indian ambassador was one of the first, if not the first, to meet him. Your columnist, present at the meeting, recalls Wałęsa’s warm references to Mahatma Gandhi’s inspiration. That inspiration clearly lives on. And given Trump’s random remarks on India, we, too, would do well to keep it handy.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

gaza-home-is-not-a-building

Sun Feb 16 09:15:56 IST 2025

Good morning, Gaza
Get up, drink my coffee and rise.
Our funeral has arrived—Mahmoud Darwish.

The two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is dead; the 53 state solution is on the cards. After Canada and Greenland, it is Gaza’s turn to attract the covetous gaze of President Trump; not unlike the proverbial spider speaking to the fly, he has offered to take over Gaza and “do a job with it, too”, whatever that means. Since then, analysts have been scratching their heads wondering whether this was a serious proposal, or whether anything will come of it or whether it is even possible.

None of these ‘whethers’ matter. What matters is that this brazenly arrogant intent was voiced and since repeated from the world’s most powerful pulpit and there was no ‘just joking’ emoji hanging over Trump’s head. In one go, naked land-grab, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity were put out as US foreign policy. No amount of walking back by White House spokesmen will help; historians will recall this as the moment when all pretence of morality—and legality—in international relations was thrown to the winds.

Having scratched their heads to bleeding point, some analysts have found a silver-lining in the proposal. It’s a bold challenge, they say, to the Arab states to step up to rebuild Gaza, a masterly googly by a president intent on being a “peacemaker and a unifier” and so what if he is taking the scenic route to that destination. These analysts are fooling themselves.

This was neither an off-the-cuff remark, nor a provocative negotiating stand. This is the deeply ingrained instinct of a real estate developer coming to the fore. He sees the blue Mediterranean lapping at the Gaza strip—all the more visible now after relentless Israeli bombing has removed offending buildings—and the vision of a Riviera of the Middle East presents itself, complete with blubbery billionaires in dark glasses and flowery shorts sprawled under beach umbrellas. The ruins of Gazan homes can always be levelled out. And the people? Oh, they are poor, needy, and non-white. They will be happy to be moved out to “far safer, more beautiful places”.

This idea was no sudden inspiration. Last June, this column reported that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, saw the devastated Gaza strip as “very valuable”, very hot “waterfront property”. He had advised Israel to “finish the job… move the people out and then clean it up” and even offered to “bulldoze something” in the Negev to dump the Gazans. The president has gone a step further: throw them into Egypt and Jordan. Trump’s current Middle-East man, golf partner and another real estate type, Steve Witkoff, shares this approach. For Netanyahu and his messianic rightwing supporters, all this is manna from heaven: annexation of Gaza (and hopefully the West Bank), expulsion of the debilitated Palestinians, all done by the Americans, would be a dream finish.

But even the slickest real estate honcho needs a land title, and thereby hangs this tale: the Palestinians are not on the market. Besides, this is not just about land. It is about identity, national memory, religion… obliterating all this amounts to what the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls ‘memoricide’ and yes, it rhymes with homicide.

Besides, there’s something called home, and it’s not a building. Home is where the bones of your ancestors lie, where a familiar wind caresses you, where the silences speak to you. If the powerful of the world continue to see Gaza as just land to be levelled, then in the words of Darwish, Gaza “will continue to explode. It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live”.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

why-donald-trump-covets-greenland

Fri Jan 17 15:29:08 IST 2025

There’s no denying it. Donald Trump is a prince among real estate developers, known for his pushy, winner-takes-all approach. Trump hotels, resorts, casinos and golf courses are evidence of that. The same acquisitive instinct could be behind his recent intent to acquire Greenland, by force if required. For one, Greenland looks big—almost the size of Africa on a Mercator projection of the world map—and in Trump’s eyes, big is beautiful.

But, clearly, there’s more to this than the covetous intent of a real estate mogul. The US has long seen Greenland as essential to its defence and its acquisition has been discussed before. Not just in 2019 during Trump’s first term when it was dismissed as so much nonsensical bluster but as early as 1946 and even 1867, the year is which America acquired Alaska from Russia. During World War II, the US occupied Greenland to prevent its use by Germany following German occupation of Denmark. Greenland remains crucial for missile air defence for the US and an important space base is placed there; this, however, is clearly not enough.

Greenland abuts into the Arctic, a region that hitherto lay in relatively frozen balance between the Arctic nations—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Russia and the US. Now climate change—ironically, something that Trump dismisses as a hoax—has upset the equilibrium. According to a recent study, the Arctic region has been warming four times faster than the rest of the world over the past four decades; since 1980, the volume of Arctic Sea ice has declined by as much as 75 per cent.

This has both wide-ranging commercial and strategic implications. Scientists are projecting that by 2035, parts of the Arctic will be free of ice during summer months, opening up huge opportunities in commercial and tourist shipping, fisheries, energy and mineral resources. Transit times through the Northern Sea Route (largely claimed by Russia) and the Northwest Passage (largely claimed by Canada) could be shortened by 30-50 per cent between the US, Europe and Asia. These claims, incidentally, are disputed and therein lies the seed for further conflict.

Greenland alone has huge mineral riches. One report estimates 1,000 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves and 90 billion barrels of oil; additionally there are massive reserves of gold, zinc, nickel and copper. Greenland also holds 25 of the 34 minerals such as graphite, lithium and rare earths classified as “critical raw materials” and essential for energy transformation technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Given the high stakes and conflicting claims the strategic race is likely to be brutal, particularly in the increasingly confrontational geo-political landscape. Unlike Antarctica, the Arctic is not a global common and there is no over-arching treaty that governs it, except the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). For the present, Russia is the dominant power, with the longest Arctic coastline, half the Arctic population, a full-fledged strategic policy and the presence of its nuclear submarine and bomber fleets. The expansion of NATO to include Sweden and Finland has brought it to Russia’s door in the Arctic, too. China, though not an Arctic nation, has been very active, investing heavily in ports, energy and mining. Some years ago it offered to fund the building of Greenland’s airports and Denmark, under US pressure, had to offer its own funding.

The strategic importance of Greenland for the US is clear, particularly given the increasing Chinese and Russian commercial and strategic footprint. But a threat of occupation by force is not the way. It will only prove that the world has lost its centre and the line between right and wrong has been finally obliterated.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

good-fences-make-good-neighbours

Sat Dec 21 11:32:33 IST 2024

When fences erode, or nobody is at home, neighbours tend to take advantage. A nibble at a patch of land, a fence post pushed a yard away, a wall extended, a fact created on the ground.

After the dramatic collapse of the Assad regime, something similar is happening in the Golan Heights, militarily wrested from Syria by Israel in 1967. Part of the area was vacated by Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and a Separation Zone created between the Syrian and Israeli held territories under the 1974 Disengagement Agreement. The arrangement was monitored by the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) along with the UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO). India contributed significantly to this operation, even suffering two fatal casualties. The agreement worked remarkably well for 50 years, to the extent that Israel preferred the known devil of the father-son Assad regime to the unpredictable progeny of the Arab Spring.

Now all bets are off. With the Syrian army’s collapse, Israel has set aside the 1974 Agreement, moved the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) quickly into the Separation Zone and occupied the dominating heights of Mount Hermon. IDF tanks are once again in Quneitra, just 40km short of Damascus; Israeli soldiers are even closer. Quneitra, incidentally, was bombed to a graveyard of concrete blocks by Israel before it withdrew in 1974. Syria has preserved it in that condition, a symbol of Israeli occupation; Rajiv Gandhi was conducted around the ruined town during his 1988 Syria visit.

Israel’s ground offensive has been accompanied by over 600 air strikes that have devastated Syria’s weapon systems, missile depots, air defence infrastructure, research facilities and Assad’s navy. There has been no outcry except some criticism from Arab League members and, predictably, France. The hapless UNDOF, in a masterly understatement, has observed “a significant increase in IDF movements within the area of separation….”

Israel projects these moves as defensive measures: to prevent the border zone or Assad’s weapon systems to fall in militant hands; control of Mount Hermon is essential for better surveillance deep into Syria and Lebanon. The move into the demilitarised separation zone is said to be a temporary exercise to create, in the words of Israel’s defence minister, a “sterile defence zone”. This concept of a modern-day moat, if followed by other countries, could make a mockery of international borders.

A quick Israeli reversal appears unlikely. Benjamin Netanyahu sees Assad’s fall—for which he claimed substantial credit—as a great opportunity for Israel, a tectonic shift as important as the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that divided up the Ottoman empire to create present-day States; in other words, an opportunity to redraw borders. Add to that his need to wipe out the ignominy of October 7 and his ambition to be remembered as the leader who changed the Middle East fundamentally to Israel’s advantage; a militarily maximalist and expansionist agenda is at the core of this vision. Domestic support will not be lacking, nor is there any fear of admonishment from Donald Trump.

Clearly, the IDF boys are not coming home soon. The possibility of any good-neighbourly gesture, always unlikely, that could have been the basis of peace with a new Syria has evaporated. If Syria resurrects, future conflict over occupied territories is assured. If Syria dissolves, then Gaddafi’s warning to Arab leaders may be worth revisiting: “Their plan is to remove Lebanon and Syria so that the borders of the so-called Israel are with Turkey rather than with Arab countries. You will see this achieved, if not in our era, then in our children’s era. Syria will become five small states.” Let’s watch this space.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

hemingways-four-decade-long-love-affair-with-spain

Sat Oct 26 11:08:56 IST 2024

There are no other countries like Spain,” says Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bells Toll. The same belief propelled Hemingway’s four-decade-long love affair with the land that inspired his best work, including several novels and some of his finest short fiction. In return, he left his own indelible stamp on Spain’s global perception, creating unforgettable images of a country steeped in passion and romance, and of a people who lived and loved hard, and often died without compromise.

Apart from writing up the bull fights of Pamplona and trout fishing in the Pyrenees, he also left a boozy trail in the squares and winding lanes of old Madrid. He immortalised the restaurant Botin, by calling it “one of the best restaurants in the world” in his first novel The Sun Also Rises. Reservations are difficult to get in this old-world place known best for its roast suckling pig and milk-fed lamb but the crowds keep on coming; in fact a neighbouring restaurant vented its frustration by advertising, “Hemingway did not eat here”.

The charming Cerveceria Alemana with its wood-panelled walls, blackened paintings and black and white bull-fighting photographs speaks of a time gone by; Hemingway’s usual table looks onto the Plaza de Santa Ana—a square where old men play chess with giant pieces and students gather around a statue of the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca. There are other haunts, too—mostly bars and cafes—but to follow Papa’s trail to the last cocktail is to put one’s own liver at serious risk.

The Sun Also Rises may never have been the literary success it became but for detailed editorial suggestions from F. Scott Fitzgerald, already a well-known author and Hemingway’s friend, including the deletion of much of the opening chapter that smacked of “condescending casualness”. Hemingway, being Hemingway, followed the advice but later denied that Fitzgerald had made any contribution.

Fitzgerald, too, was not unaffected by Spain. Nick Carraway, the narrator of his best novel The Great Gatsby, is left desolate and disillusioned after Gatsby’s death. He is haunted by the deep distortion he sees in the east (of the United States). In a nightmarish vision of West Egg, the scene of much drama in the book, he compares it to “a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon”.

El Greco lived and painted his best canvases in Toledo, which rises from a rocky outcrop an hour out of Madrid. Skirted respectfully by the Tagus River, it is unreal and out of time. Its monochromatic and moody beauty—shades of stony beige—whispers like old wealth; its quiet dignity envelops two thousand years of history—from Rome to the Visigoths to the Umayyads and the Christians—in its ancient stones and streets and in its churches, buried mosques and synagogues.

El Greco was all tortured conflict and hypnotic intensity—the elongated figures, the complex entanglements, the pain and the anguish. One of his most remarkable canvases is the famous landscape View of Toledo in which, under a sombre and imminently violent sky, Toledo lies in surreal disarray, and even the massive cathedral has been moved. Nick Carraway’s sense of distortion that goes beyond his “eyes’ power of correction” is perfectly understandable: one only has to stare long enough at Toledo rising into what Hemingway described as, “the high cloudless Spanish sky that makes the Italian sky seem sentimental”.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

when-widows-howl-and-orphans-cry

Sat Sep 28 11:23:00 IST 2024

Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strike heaven on the face….”

Shakespeare’s lines, which once described Scotland’s sorrows under his tragic hero Macbeth, resonate widely in our unfortunate world today.

The Russia-Ukraine war, as seemingly endless as the flat landscape in which it is being waged, has claimed a million dead and wounded in its 30 months. There are several pathways to its escalation but not even one faintly credible way to peace. An expanded NATO is trying to face down the Russian bear, bleeding under sanctions but dangerously aggressive. Drone strikes into Russia, including on Moscow, and the invasion of Kursk have upped the ante; direct attack on Russian territory by NATO-supplied long distance missiles is only a hair trigger away. Russian reaction is unpredictable, but its ferocity can be guaranteed. History—that easily forgotten lesson—shows that adversity only makes the Russians fight harder, and feel prouder. Enough hints have been dropped about Russia’s nuclear option. The wise would heed such hints; only the foolish laugh them away.

The Middle East has opened its own window on hell. A year after October 7, the killing has not stopped; daily destruction is the accepted norm. The indiscriminate targeting of civilians, the bombing of rubble, the targeting of school shelters and ambulances no longer stir the global conscience. Competing narratives about the Holy Land, the moral entitlement for historical justice, blame and counter-blame sound shrill and unconvincing. Gaza has once again become a metaphor. The Book of Judges tells of the Israelite warrior-judge Samson who ends up blinded—or in Milton’s words, “eyeless in Gaza”. Bound to a huge millstone, he can only drag himself around in futile circles, until in anger he pulls down the temple of the Philistines, killing both them and himself.

Genuine anger post the October 7 attack has been converted into a strategic opportunity by a leadership powered by cynical self-preservation and misplaced messianic zeal. Israel is today eyeless in Gaza, locked in a futile war from which no good will come—neither for the Arab nor for the Jew. Even in the ancient game of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, the dice can be heavily loaded, especially when international humanitarian law lies in tatters. As do the prospects of lasting regional peace. Or of normalisation between Israel and the Arab states. Or of a state for the Palestinians. Things are not likely to get any better; in fact, they are bound to get much worse. No one knows where the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah will stop. Regional war is closer than it has ever been since 1973.

Meanwhile, seemingly on another burning planet, nearly 70 million people in southern Africa spread across Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, Lesotho… face death by deadly drought, triggered by El Nino and extreme climate conditions. Zimbabwe will cull 200 of its elephants to relieve food insecurity; Namibia has a target of 700 animals, including 83 elephants, to help feed its people.

Foreign assistance has been niggardly: the European Union has given 22 million euros (as against 40 billion euros to Ukraine, besides bilateral European funding); the World Food Programme is struggling to raise even $400 million. The US, having earmarked $175 billion for Ukraine (and $12.5 billion for Israel over and above the annual assistance of $3.8 billion), has doled out less than a hundred million dollars to Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

As in Macbeth’s Scotland, there is another drought, that of empathy and vision. Most people can work for national interest; it takes statesmen to worry about humanity. We await their coming.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

soviet-union-of-yore-had-a-straightforward-way-of-naming-places

Sat Aug 31 11:10:05 IST 2024

The Soviet Union of yore had a straightforward way of naming places. Moscow’s railway stations, for instance, are named after destinations, broadly defined. Before the war, the beautiful Kievsky station used to send trains to Kiev in Ukraine, an erstwhile Soviet republic.

Leningradsky station flags off trains towards erstwhile Leningrad (now St. Petersburg); like the city, the station, too, has changed its name several times. To avoid any confusion, it has the same design as the Moskovsky station in St. Petersburg, from which the trains leave for Moscow. From the Kazansky station, trains travel towards Kazan and beyond; from Yaroslavsky station they go to the Yaroslav region and further to the Pacific; Belorussky station services trains going towards Belarus, also once a Soviet Republic, and so on.

Hotels and restaurants were named after Soviet cities or republics or friendly capitals, all left of the Iron Curtain. You would not have found a Hotel California or a Café du Paris but there were hotels named Leningrad, Warsaw, Berlin (remember a wall once ran through Berlin), Budapest, Belgrade and of course Moskva and the gigantic Rossiya, getting lost in which could be a pleasant pastime. Peking merited a restaurant, not a hotel, after the Sino-Soviet rift; possibly this may have since been upgraded or at least started serving Chinese food. Praga, as in Prague, a cakery in Old Arbat, sold a popular chocolate cake. Baku served Azerbaijani kababs…. you get the point.

With the same blunt directness, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, named the gigantic hotel he inaugurated in 1956 ‘Ukraina’ to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav following which, according to the Russian narrative, Ukraine became part of the Russian empire; the Ukrainians, to put it mildly, disagree. Situated on the sweeping Kutuzovsky Prospekt on the banks of the Moskva river, the Ukraina was one of Stalin’s seven staggering Gothic skyscrapers—known as seven sisters (or, less charitably, Stalin’s follies)—built just to make Americans gasp. Moscow State University occupies the tallest of these sisters and the Russian foreign ministry another. In its heyday, the Ukraina was considered an engineering marvel and was, with its thousand rooms, the largest in Europe.

But by the early 80s, when I lived as a junior diplomat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt (Soviet supremo Leonid Brezhnev, too, lived on the same avenue but somehow we never met in the queue for black bread), the hotel had the sad air of an ageing ballerina in laddered stockings. It was patronised mostly by official delegations who had little choice. Dim lighting permeated from the windows of its 34 floors and its long, carpeted corridors were musty. The buffet used to shut down during lunch from noon to 2pm—a common practice in Soviet Moscow. In the garden stood the granite statue of the powerful Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, a cape of snow resting on his shoulders as he stared stonily at the skiers on the frozen river.

The Ukraina has since been privatised, refurbished and rebranded as the luxurious Radisson Collection Hotel. But the irony of this iconic building, always Ukraina in public memory, dominating the Moscow landscape at a beautiful bend in the river will haunt generations to come. The longer the drones fly, the bombs explode and children die, the more embittered will be this memory with the bile of war. Shevchenko will continue to stand there deep in thought and his accusatory stare will be difficult to ignore. As will be the questions from his poem “The Caucasus”, a severe castigation of Russian imperialism: “And what of blood? And what of tears?”

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

fact-checkers-and-us-presidential-elections

Sat Jul 06 10:45:14 IST 2024

The recent presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a sorry spectacle that ended with two old men being childish about their golf handicaps. But Biden had at least one bright moment when he deployed a rare word—malarkey—to describe the torrent of misinformation unleashed by Trump. Biden couldn’t quite keep up with that cascade as he was too busy waffling; fittingly, he stopped by at Waffle House on his way home after the debate.

I had to look up ‘malarkey’. An American invention from the 1920s, it has synonyms aplenty: balderdash, baloney, blah, poppycock…. You get the point. The sheer amount of malarkey during that debate was described by one news platform as a “tsunami of falsity”; not surprisingly, fact-checkers are now having a field day spotting, categorising, grading the falsehoods and issuing corrections. Fact-checking, once an in-house job assigned to juniors and interns, is today a fast-growing pillar of modern journalism offering sky-high growth. The raw material that fuels this profession seems unlimited: a never-ending supply of falsehood, fake news, half-truths and biased reporting. All easily and instantly propagated over the internet and social media.

Among the several establishments committed to fact-checking in the interests of transparency and truth is the The Washington Post; its column “The Fact Checker”, headed by senior editor Glenn Kessler, has been in the business for 15 years. An inaugural signatory to the code of the principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (yes, there is such a thing), it applies its “Pinocchio” test to distinguish fact from political fiction. One Pinocchio means a statement that is “mostly true” but with some “shading of the facts”; two Pinocchios imply significant omissions and exaggerations; three Pinocchios mean a claim is “mostly false” and four Pinocchios indicate a way-out whopper. An upside-down Pinocchio signifies a flip-flop and a broad red tick is the rarely awarded Gepetto Checkmark for the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” If a claim repeatedly gets three or four Pinocchios, it becomes a Bottomless Pinocchio. The last category was introduced in 2018, when Trump was in full flow. Incidentally, The Washington Post recorded 30,573 untruths by Trump in his four-year term, averaging 21 falsehoods a day. A huge electronic board hanging over the Post’s lobby in Washington DC enabled you to check the daily score.

PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize winning website, is another fact-checking powerhouse, with a Truth-o-Meter replacing the Pinocchio. Completely ridiculous claims show up as Pants on Fire on the Truth-o-Meter; Trump’s claim that Biden had allowed millions of people illegally into the country from jails and mental institutions was adjudged a Pants on Fire claim. PolitiFact also runs a Flip-o-Meter to measure consistency in statements. A full flop on this meter is the equivalent of an upside-down Pinocchio. It isn’t just politicians who are under the scanner: PunditFact, a partner website, is constantly fact-checking talking heads. Snopes, another internet-based platform, calls itself the definitive source for “urban legends, folklore, myths, rumours, and misinformation”. They fact-checked Biden’s statement that 158 or 159 presidential historians had voted Trump as the worst president in American history; the claim was judged as true, though the number of survey participants was actually 154; the top spot went, no surprises, to Abraham Lincoln.

So young boys who once dreamt of becoming railway engine drivers when they grew up should now aim to be fact-checkers. The best and brightest should of course go west like the IITians of yore, to the shining city on the hill where nothing is but what is not. But chances are that soon we will have enough malarkey of our own and they can all come back to Bengaluru.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

world-is-losing-it-we-are-fundamentally-broken

Sat Jun 08 11:06:38 IST 2024

A tour d’horizon—a global survey of hotspots—is standard ambassadorial practice. Conducted usually over lunch with a counterpart in some comfortable diplomatic perch, it helps suss out mutual positions and makes for a decent dispatch home. But the tour d’horizon of this former ambassador from this distinctly uncomfortable perch in sizzling Delhi has no silver lining.

The resultant dispatch is short and direct: the world is losing it; we are fundamentally broken, morally bereft, intellectually devalued. Take, for instance, the Uttar Pradesh government’s plans to cut 33,000 fully grown trees and nearly 80,000 other plants in protected forest areas to create a new 111km-long road for the kanwar yatra. Unless this is a deeply spiritual method of countering climate change, this proposal—announced even as the heat wave blazed, forest fires crackled and polling officers died untimely deaths—is incomprehensible. Ambient temperatures can be 10 degrees lower on roads with a tree canopy. Someone please say no: the kanwariyas will bless you for the shade.

Or take, further afield, Nikki Haley crouching in Israel. She is inscribing a message with a purple pen on US artillery shells: “Finish them,” she scrawls, and draws a valentine heart between Israel and the US. Those shells are not going to finish Hamas, as the last eight months of relentless bombardment, estimated even in the first 100 days to be the kilo-tonnage of three nuclear bombs, has shown. But they will finish many more starving innocent refugees cowering in tents. Where is the empathy that must cover Palestinian innocents as well as Israeli hostages? For one who comes from the land of Gandhi, Haley must know that more pain is not the balm for pain. Valentine hearts are for schoolgirls; think of the child’s beating heart, the size of her tiny fist, that the shell will “finish”before it finds, if ever, the terrorist.

And what does Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and go-to man on the Middle East see in the devastated Gaza strip? “Very valuable,” very hot “waterfront property”. He advises Israel to “finish (again finish!) the job…move the people out and then clean it up.” Clean up two million lives and homes so that a greedy landshark can get to work for “filthy lucre’s sake (St James Bible, Titus 1:11)”. And he kindly offers to “bulldoze something”in the Negev to dump the Gazans. He knows not that disembodied ghosts will howl through his high-rise paradise of shining steel and glass and bloodied children will dance in that Disneyland. Kushner’s crass vision may yet be realised if Trump, the master dealer of real estate, is president again. So far, the people of the US have shown no visceral objection to accepting as their leader a felon, convicted on 34 counts, with his baggage of fraud and deceit, racism and slander, obscenity and greed and putting him at the head of the world’s most powerful military force.

In such a world it does not seem strange that while you and I meticulously separate our kitchen waste, North Korea has found a better solution. Hundreds of balloons dropped garbage bags filled with excrement and other rubbish—recyclable, compostable, hazardous—on their neighbours in the south. South Koreans lamented this “clear violation of international law” and advised their citizens to stay indoors; to be fair, they had earlier sent balloons filled with USB sticks with South Korean pop music videos to the North.

No matter which way you run this tour d’horizon of an unhinged world, it plunges downhill. The heartfelt query of the hapless Major Clipton in The Bridge on the River Kwai comes to mind: “Are they (both) mad? Or am I going mad? Or is it the sun?”

The writer is former high commissioner to the UK and former ambassador to the US.

when-germany-decided-to-go-cool

Sat May 11 11:58:49 IST 2024

Everybody knows what 420 means in the Indian context. But in American parlance it is something very different: four-twenty or 4/20 or April 20 denotes cannabis celebration; its cultural references are rooted in the hippie culture of the 1960s and 1970s. This year, on April 20, thousands gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate for a collective “smoke-in” in a farcical throwback to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Only this time they were not celebrating the collapse of the Iron Curtain, but the part legalisation by Germany of cannabis (or marijuana, weed, pot, dope, grass…) for recreational use.

For just when you thought that Germany was all about economy, efficiency, automobiles and autobahns with only the Oktoberfest breaking its dour discipline, the country decided to go cool. On April 1, oddly, the ruling coalition partly lived up to its agreed agenda of legalising cannabis for adult recreational use (now that’s an election promise worth its grass). I say partly because licensed sale is still not allowed though a pilot project is on the cards. But even if adult Germans have to still sidle up to their local paan-wallah, they can now hold 25 grams of the stuff in public and 50 grams at home; besides, they can now cultivate three plants in their back garden. Cannabis clubs of up to 500 members will soon mushroom across the country, supplying up to 50 grams to members per month. The government hopes that all this will dent the black market and enable better public health, but critics point to obvious dangers of increased drug consumption.

Of course, there are caveats: no cannabis consumption for under-18s and within 100m of schools, playgrounds and kindergartens; Deutsche Bahn, the German railways, has banned cannabis use at its train stations; and Bavaria will still not allow marijuana consumption at its Oktoberfest beer-drinking orgy, which by some strange calculation, is called a “family festival.” The Bavarian prohibition seems a bit thick, considering that six million litres of relatively strong beer will be consumed over two weeks; in other words, you can get drunk, but not high.

With this pivot, Germany, one of the most conservative countries in Europe, joins Malta and Luxembourg in liberalising recreational cannabis use. Several other models of cannabis regulation are in play: The Netherlands allows consumption in its famed coffee shops and possession up to five grams; Spain tolerates cannabis clubs and several others, particularly Belgium and the Czech Republic are considering more liberal regimes and will no doubt be encouraged by the German example. Canada, Uruguay, Portugal and Jamaica are some of the other great weed destinations outside Europe. A patchwork of regulations governs cannabis in the US: though prohibited under federal law, it is allowed for recreational and medical use in 24 states (plus the District of Columbia) while another 14 allow medical use only.

In a recent move, the US federal authorities are proposing to move cannabis from a prohibited list that includes heroin and LSD to a less tightly controlled list of drugs permitted for medical use. President Joe Biden, who has earlier pardoned thousands convicted federally for marijuana possession, would no doubt favour this move. A softer federal control on marijuana, following up on the cancellation of more than two lakh student loans, will be effective outreach to younger, left-leaning voters, a crucial segment in Biden’s re-election bid. It remains to be seen how far all this will counter the spreading discontent and disenchantment with the president’s handling of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza.

Yes, you would have to be smoking something to connect Gaza and marijuana, but there it is.

The writer is former high commissioner to the UK and former ambassador to the US.