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Drumbeat: Ad Buzzaar

Politics	Business	Expressions	General
World	Sports	Leisure	States

Saturday, May 16, 1998

	Spread it around The BJP has decreed a day of celebration and seems to have appointed itself master of ceremonies. Some self-congratulation is certainly in order, given the success that India has achieved. But that, precisely, is the point. Surely the credit for a national achievement cannot go to a single party. Congress president Sonia Gandhi was perfectly justified in making her `social call' on the Prime Minister.		Redundancy of the dictator "Hang Suharto and his family". President Suharto of Indonesia is too immersed in his own fantasy of eternal power to read the writing on the banner. This is the predicament of every dictator: even when the ground beneath his feet swells with popular anger and national disillusion, he refuses to accept his own redundancy.
	The spiral of silence Now we know why A.B. Vajpayee did not attend the G-15 summit. He had "an important announcement to make" right here in New Delhi on Buddha Poornima day. So lesser mortals like Krishan Kant could take care of diplomatic exercises in futility like talking about cross-border terrorism in Cairo. The same Cairo where Mahathir Mohamad was going full blast against western hegemony.		Riven on the inside History, politics and international diplomacy have been repeatedly cruel to the Palestinians. For several decades the erstwhile colonial powers, having divided people and territories before and after decolonisation, ignored their legitimate claims. Battered and bruised for more than thirty years and driven out of their homes -- ever since the Six Day War -- they discern no immediate silver lining.

High growth, no aid, and the bomb
The title of this article, as those in the RSS-BJP set-up would recall, is the crux of the argument made by Dr Subramaniam Swamy in his Harvard paper of the '60s, which, according to many, was the beginning of the formal thought in the RSS on the bomb. This very logic is now being used by the government when it says that the sanctions imposed by various countries will not hit us badly.

Breeding for purity
Twin threats face the Asiatic lion today: while on the one hand environmentalists fear that extensive inbreeding may render the captive population infertile, on the other hand they are worried that hybridisation -- especially with the African lion -- may have left very few specimens of pure Asiatic lion.