Navtej Sarna

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.

botswana-s-elephant-dilemma

Fri Apr 12 11:42:48 IST 2024

In 218 BCE, Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, made his audacious assault on Rome from the north, crossing the Alps with his army of 30,000 men, 15,000 cavalry and most famously, 37 elephants. In the ensuing two millennia, Hannibal would have gone the way of most history, gradually reducing to a footnote. But largely because of the image of his elephants in snowbound Alps, he has reached metaphoric status, immortalised in film and legend.

If a mere 37 elephants could so impress the European psyche, imagine the result if Botswana’s President, Mokgweetsi Masisi, were to deliver on his threat—or promise—of sending 20,000 elephants to Germany and, as he added for good measure, he “won’t take no for an answer.” The thought conjures up delicious images: thousands of pachyderms marching down the Unter den Linden to the tune of Baby Elephant Walk, or shooting the breeze in Potsdamer Platz or heading down to Munich’s beer halls to quench their summer thirst.

Elephants have been gifted by states before. During World War II for instance, zoo animals were ruthlessly slaughtered in Europe, Japan and even India for fear that bombardment may free dangerous predators to roam the streets; the two Indian elephants in Tokyo zoo died of forced starvation. When peace returned, hundreds of Japanese children wrote letters to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru expressing anguish at the loss of the elephants. Nehru promptly sent an elephant named after his own daughter, Indira, as a peace ambassador to Japan. A similar gift, this time named Shanti, reached Berlin in 1951.

But 20,000? Costly to transport, for one. Even in the case of Indira, the MEA had to explore the funding issue with princely states. But regardless of whether it is sent CIF or FOB, this jumbo gift is likely to remain a rhetorical flourish; the Germans will no doubt put on a thick skin and ignore the offer, given its acrimonious origins. President Masisi’s threat came after Germany, presently one of the largest importers of hunting trophies in the EU, considered a proposal, backed by animal protection groups, to ban such imports. Britain had toyed with a similar proposal earlier only to be told that Botswana would send 10,000 elephants to London’s Hyde Park; the thought of this bunch performing their morning ablutions in the Serpentine lake in the park must have quickly dampened the ardour of British conservationists.

Botswana feels that western countries and conservation purists fail to appreciate the problems of living with its 1.3 lakh elephants, more than twice the ecologically sustainable number. Big-game hunting, with proper permits, is a major revenue earner for local communities—a 12-day hunting package can bring in as much as $50,000—and a zero-threat to the species; indeed, it is argued, it enables better conservation by strengthening local capacity to better manage man-animal conflict and discourages indiscriminate poaching. Uncontrolled elephant population, which doubled during an earlier five-year hunting ban, leads to widespread destruction of property, crops and lives and hampers development in a poor country; keen to keep numbers to sustainable levels, Botswana has already sent 8,000 elephants to neighbouring Angola and offered another 500 to Mozambique.

Even if rhetorical, Botswana’s dramatic offer underlines that wildlife preservation is not always a zero-sum game. When it comes to living with elephants, there is a lot of grey; sustainable and pragmatic conservation rather than moral high-mindedness may be the way to go. As the young musician Dhruv Visvanath says in his well-known song Botswana, “….what you call pain I call my home.” There’s a point to ponder.

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

biden-trump-rematch-lacks-punch

Sat Mar 16 11:31:42 IST 2024

In March 1971, I spent several hours in a dentist’s waiting room, dreading the impending torture of the drill. The only compensation were the handy American magazines, full of arguably the most anticipated sporting event in history—the Big Fight between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali.

Both were undefeated champions: Ali was returning from the wilderness after four years having being stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing the military draft; in his absence, Frazier had emerged as the greatest boxer around. Beyond the boxing, there was an immense cultural rizz that divided public consciousness: Ali the anti-establishment hero, a conscientious objector; Frazier a war supporter. Not just a packed Madison Square Garden but a closed-circuit and free television audience of 300 million waited for Ali’s famed shuffle and Frazier’s killer left hook. In the event, Frazier won in 15 rounds. Ali would avenge the defeat in a 1974 rematch and in the ‘Thrilla in Manila’ in 1975 but by then the world, as is its wont, had moved on; the Vietnam war was over and the oomph had gone out of the contest.

Fifty years on, Americans are doomed to suffer a different rematch: Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, the latter having emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee on Super Tuesday, or Super Snoozeday as one wag remarked, given its dull predictability. Nobody, but nobody, wants this rematch: twenty per cent of American voters have been classified as “double haters”: they hate both Trump and Biden, only they cannot tell who they hate more. Yet it is a supreme irony that this most powerful and talented of all nations has no better choice on offer.

Biden’s main problem is that he has celebrated too many birthdays: he will be 82 if inaugurated again. His recent state of the union address was celebrated not so much for its content but for the fact that he did not trip on the way to the rostrum. Yet he had no serious contender for the Democratic nomination. Besides the deference to incumbency, there is a broad understanding that Biden has done a steady job in a troubled post-Covid landscape, even if that is rarely communicated. In addition, there is Biden’s claim that he is the only one capable of beating Trump. Yet he is up against the young and the progressive Democrats, besides the Arab Americans, for his overly forgiving attitude towards Israel.

In the other corner is the highly divisive and provocative Trump. Despite his attempted January 6 insurrection, and facing 91 felony charges in four indictments, he has practically pocketed the Republican nomination and polls give him the edge against Biden. The dream boy of the New York elite is also a champion populist appealing to base instincts by espousing racism, white supremacist thought and anti-immigrant rhetoric as it suits him. His loyal MAGA constituency that voted for him in 2020 is still solidly behind him.

Things are expected to go all the way to 15 rounds. Indications are that only about one lakh uncommitted voters in five or six swing states will ultimately decide the presidency. Biden’s best bet might be Trump himself: Americans may baulk at giving him the White House again, especially if by then he is a convicted felon.

Meanwhile, the seatbelt signs are on. Trump’s gibes, not half as witty as Ali’s ditties, are plumbing new depths: he recently mimicked Biden’s stutter. A presidential debate, if it takes place, will have fireworks too, though unlikely to match the thrill of 1974 Frazier-Ali brawl in the ABC studio, when the two champs ended up wrestling on the floor on live television. Still, it’s a thought.

The writer is former ambassador to the US.

mirza-ghalib-dilapidated-haveli-offers-only-heartbreak

Fri Feb 16 14:37:03 IST 2024

Ballimaran, contrary to a minor urban legend, is not the quarter of cat-killers. It is where once lived the makers of ballis, or the long oars used by boatmen. Those boats and boatmen are long gone, as much else in old Delhi: the water channel that once ran through the bazaar, the shimmering pool and square built by Jahanara Begum that gave Chandni Chowk its name, the trams that clanged through the street till the 1960s.

But still, on an early Sunday morning, an evanescent charm hangs over the now pedestrianised zone. Ballimaran is now the domain of shoe-sellers. There are cartloads of baby shoes, sackfuls of ladies’ sandals. Kachoris and pooris are being fried, and quickly sold, for breakfast. A man expertly chops papayas into sharp slices and serves them in newspaper strips. There is the thick smell of milk boiling in a huge kadhai, its surface a sea of pinpricks.

A quick turn to the right and we are in Gali Qasim Jaan, where Mirza Ghalib, the greatest of Urdu poets, spent his late years. Here is the haveli where he lived, the room where he wrote; the pulse quickens when a passer-by tells his daughter–“they’ve come to meet Ghalib”. I have done similar pilgrimages before: to the home of John Keats in London’s Hampstead Heath, Hemingway’s homes in Cuba and Key West, the room in Atlanta where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind, and others. These are treasured journeys of the spirit where readers tread softly in hushed silence and commune with their literary heroes. They search for insights into the alchemy of creation; they validate their long-held impressions of a writer’s inspiration and personal relationships. They enter the inner lives of poets, grasp the light they saw from their windows, the steps they heard as they put pen to paper.

But the dilapidated condition of Ghalib’s haveli offers only heartbreak. True that three decades ago it was all gone, turned into coal store and heater factory. True that a bust of the poet, donated by Gulzar sahib, has been put in the small reclaimed portion. But that is about all on the credit side.

Otherwise, there is dust and grime. A faint light enters from the half-broken, dirt-streaked glass panes of a smudged skylight. A badly damaged chandelier, with several lamps askew, dangles below it. Cheaply produced posters of Ghalib’s couplets, incompetently translated, hang haphazard on the walls. Behind a smudged glass panel sits a mannequin of the poet. Utensils and clothes of his era lie in dishevelled dusty display. A broken tea cup is strangely balanced on a dripping tap. One can barely read the inscriptions below the exhibits. Copies of his ghazals are curling and corroding. There is no guide, no commentary, no music, no proper lighting. This is no way to treat a national treasure, a poet who, according to the great scholar Ralph Russell, would have been the greatest poet of all time had he written in English. A news report of September last claims that the haveli was spruced up for G20; I shudder to think what it looked like before that.

Ghalib would have reacted sardonically. Perhaps he would have composed a verse to say that the haveli should have been better left as a coal store; at least that would have brought warmth to a hearth. Perhaps this is what he meant when he wrote:

hue mar ke ham jo rusvā hue kyuuñ na ˙gharq-e-dariyā

na kabhˉıjanāza uthtā na kahˉıñ mazār hotā

After death I was reviled, I would have rather drowned

No remnant to be defiled, no grave site to be found.

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

too-clever-by-half-in-dubai

Sat Dec 23 14:55:34 IST 2023

School athletics taught us that anyone can be good at high jump; the trick is to keep the bar low enough. The same, it appears, is true for climate negotiations.

Take the Dubai COP28 that ended last week in a self-congratulatory frenzy with the sleep-deprived, caffeine-sozzled delegates victoriously clutching a ‘historic’ deal. The reason for their euphoria was that after three decades of wrangling, they had agreed to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels, the main culprits behind global warming. That’s it. Only transition away, no phasing out, or down; no roadmap, no deadlines, no responsibilities. A bit like if the Alcoholics Anonymous were to agree after 28 meetings that yes, booze was bad for them and then head to the bar to celebrate.

“Big deal,” you might well say. But that is the reality of the COP system, the self-delusionary circus where corporate interests, development imperatives and political posturing are all finessed by clever drafting. Incremental progress is the best the system delivers, never mind that the burning need is progress by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the international community can salve its thick-skinned conscience by saying that this consensus-based system best balances all interests.

But for someone like Anne Rasmussen, the doughty lead-negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, this was not good enough. In calm, measured tones and with a flower tucked behind her ear—a Polynesian cultural trademark—she underlined the “litany of loopholes” that make the agreement woefully inadequate to achieve the required deep reductions in emissions. The Alliance was however checkmated by Sultan al Jaber, the president of the COP, and ironically the head of the UAE’s national oil and gas company, (real men scoff at old-fashioned ideas like conflict of interest); he gavelled the deal through when the small island delegates were not in the room. Multilateral negotiations often succeed by sleight of hand.

But from Tuvalu to Dominica, from the South Pacific to the Caribbean, climate change is an existential threat for low-lying island states. Though least responsible for global warming, they face the maximum damage: rising sea-levels, coastal erosion, loss of marine biodiversity, cyclones and hurricanes, loss of coastal habitats and so on. Nevertheless, these states have shown remarkable resilience and capacity to adapt: the enhanced sea defences and early warning systems of the Maldives; Fiji’s strengthened buildings and elaborate relocation plans; the restoration of mangrove forests and so on. The Loss and Damage Fund activated at COP28 should theoretically help; however, while the annual global damage is about $400 billion, the contributions amount to only $700 million, with the US giving a paltry $17.5 million.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry, that had over 2,400 lobbyists at Dubai, is splurging. Sultan Al Jaber’s company will invest another $150 billion over seven years. Shell will expand activity in the Gulf of Mexico; ExxonMobil will increase capital spending by $4 billion by 2027. TotalEnergies is all set to drill deep into South Africa’s Orange Basin. Rishi Sunak has vowed to “max out” the UK’s fossil fuel resources through intensive North Sea drilling. Everybody claims they are on target for net-zero except Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate, who calls global warming a ‘hoax’ and promises to roll out more oil and gas projects. “We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” he recently assured gleeful oil executives.

All this must be very intimidating for Rasmussen when she takes issue with the powerful petro-states and the double F-word lobby. When asked in an interview how she managed, she responded, “I pray a lot.” In 2023, the warmest year in recorded history, we would all be well-advised to join her.

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

the-curious-case-of-rwanda

Sat Nov 25 11:35:57 IST 2023

In 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, a South Asian immigrant in the British Midlands was asked for his views. He was fervently in favour of Brexit. Too many bloody foreigners coming in, he said, without a touch of irony. The ingrained reaction of an immigrant: let me in and then shut the door? Or the zeal of a new convert, or simply, internalised racism? Whatever you call it, the same tendencies characterise the anti-immigrant stance of three British politicians with immigrant backgrounds: Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and the earlier home secretary, Priti Patel. This zeal came to a frothing head in the Rwanda Plan, which fortunately has been struck down by the UK Supreme Court.

The Plan’s journey makes bizarre reading. Boris Johnson, under pressure to take a hard line on migrants—many from conflict zones—coming across the Channel in small boats in thousands, decided to throw money at the problem: pay another country to accept the unwashed, unwanted masses. This would relieve Britain’s overloaded asylum system and theoretically serve as a deterrent to migrants. Patel rolled up her sleeves and got down to it. Lists of potential partners who were signatories to the UN refugee convention and showed compliance with human rights laws, were drawn up; Rwanda, with its dismal human rights record and repressive governance, was an unlikely candidate. However, in the end, Rwanda it was. Johnson declared, with habitual disregard for facts, that Rwanda was “one of the safest countries in the world, globally recognised for its record on welcoming and integrating migrants.” Besides, the Rwandans were good chaps: they had joined the Commonwealth, hadn’t they, without having been a British colony? Potential deportees were handed fact-sheets that described their new home as “a land of a thousand hills… home to a wide array of wildlife,” a tourist brochure line that sounded utterly cynical in this context.

The facts, as is their habit, spoke for themselves: Rwanda had earlier fouled up a similar deal with Israel under which it had accepted several thousand Eritrean refugees that Israel turned out; many of the refugees were later expelled from Rwanda, some were killed in Libya and others drowned in the Mediterranean in attempts to reach Europe. Besides, Rwanda’s asylum system was untested, insufficiently serviced by lawyers and interpreters, and seen as discriminatory and arbitrary. Much of this ugly reality was ignored, or doctored, as Sunak made stopping the small boats a top priority; Braverman, went further than Patel, making deportation not a possibility, but a duty. She was also given to strange dreams—“…a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.” All this was to please the Tory right-wing, and the devil take the hindmost.

Last week the Supreme Court called the government’s bluff. It ruled that Rwanda, on the basis of all evidence, was an unsafe country for asylum seekers; they would be in danger of being sent back to their home countries to face persecution. If the Plan were to go ahead, the UK would be in violation of not only the European Convention of Human Rights (which Braverman would rather leave yesterday) but several other international treaties, besides the principles of natural justice. Sunak has not given up: no doubt putting in a 70-hour week, he intends to make Rwanda safe through a treaty and push through legislation that would obviate any legal challenges. All this is right-wing pie-in-the-sky, a desperate populist stance intended to shift the blame for a failed immigration policy from 10 Downing’s doorstep. Meanwhile, 1.75 lakh asylum seekers await an initial decision on their applications. And Rwanda is richer by £140 million.

Navtej Sarna is former high commissioner to the UK and author, most recently, of the novel Crimson Spring.

day-of-judgement-is-already-here-and-verdict-is-guilty

Sat Oct 28 11:23:41 IST 2023

It is early morning in the hills beyond Shimla around Mashobra. The world is fortunately not yet awake; the sun just about is. Its first rays reach out and languorously caress the faraway snow-covered peaks and slopes, wiping away the shadows of the night. They probe the dark green of the deodar, the sharp needles of the pine; the dew on the leaves glistens in gratitude at their touch. A Kalij pheasant tentatively crosses my path, and then takes to sudden flight; the forest welcomes it back.

The only human being I meet on the path is a child of five or six, waiting beside a parked car. Dressed in a woollen hoodie and track pants—he could at that moment belong to any nation, any community, any religion. Instinctively, automatically, we exchange smiles. His is the smile of innocence, an unimpeachable embodiment of trust.

As I walk on, I wonder what kind of men would make that innocence a currency of war. Who are these people who could kill children, take them hostage, deprive them of food and water, or crush them under rubble? No reason, no cause, no vengeance seems to make any sense. Does it really matter whose Book is older, whose prophets wiser, whose temples holier or whose priests more virtuous? Or who the child-killer is, or where his gun was made or his knife sharpened, or in which language does he pray, and how many times a day? Or to what God? Surely, no God would want the sacred innocence of a child’s smile to be strangled in His name. And if indeed He does, then I don’t need that God, for that smile is as wondrous as Creation itself. It is worth more than any line in the sand, all the wisdom of the wizened sages. To crush that innocence is to confess that we learnt nothing from any Book, any sage, any God.

But such thoughts will vanish in the clear light of day. The world in its abhorrent ugliness will land at the doorstep with the sickening thud of the newspaper. The television anchors will grow hoarse as they match point to counterpoint. Analysts and apologists will dredge out every last “But what about…?” Powerful men will take their place at the political chessboard on which grey half-truths compete with white lies. Not one among them is capable of rising above the fray, of admitting that he could be wrong, of looking into his own soul. Their moral compass stops at the next election, their skill lies in dressing up hypocrisy as sincerity, their art is that of personal survival. The dice that they roll is always loaded; the chalice they proffer is tinged with poison. Their truth has many faces but each reflects only their self-interest, their penchant for pelf and power.

That is why children who should be scrambling up verdant slopes, or sailing paper boats in little streams, or struggling with arithmetic are instead staring at the terrorist’s bloodshot eyes, or dodging bullets, or cringing under the scream of the murderous missile. Or getting their names tattooed on their forearms so that they may be identified should they be victims of indiscriminate bombing.

Let us no longer pretend that all is well. Let us admit that the rot has set in deep in the human soul, that we have desecrated our world, betrayed our own children. That we, the smartest humans ever born, are the ultimate hollow men, blind and stuffed with straw. There is no Messiah whose coming can save us from ourselves. The Day of Judgement is already here, and the verdict is: Guilty.