Once more, we see the US, the UN, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, applying all kinds of pressure on Russia so that it stops its "genocide". And Russia being a weak nation and desperately needing international investment, might well give in the end and let Muslim fundamentalism take hold again in Che-chnya and then spread elsewhere like a cancer - in Dagestan, for instance, an Islamic independent state, which has called for a jihad against Russia.

The pity the Western world has for the sufferings of the poor civilians inChec-hnya is misplaced. Because not only the movements for separatism are civilian - that is, their armies are dressed in civilian dresses - but generally they get the covert or overt support of the local population from which they recruit their militants. This is particularly striking in Kashmir, where whatever the Indian Govern-ment says 95 per cent of the Muslim population of the Valley wishes independence from India, or merger with Pa-kistan. Indeed, the parallel between Ka-shmir and Chechnya is very relevant, because both the Indian and Russian governments are waging a war aga-inst Muslim separa-tism.

But there is also such a thing as karma. In the Buddhist-Hindu sense, it means that an individual or a nation pays, many years or many centuries, later for atrocities or faults committed in the past lives or ancient cycles; in the Western, or Cartesian sense, it means that an individual or a nation suffers logically at the hands of revengeful traditional adversaries, against whom it committed earlierwrongs. In this light, it is easier to understand and accept the sufferings of Muslim civilian populations, whether in Chechnya, Kashmir, or Yugoslavia, knowing that th-roughout the ages, Muslims were ruthless conquerors and have committed untold atrocities.

Take, for instance, the recent agony of the Bosnian (and the Albanians) Muslims, at the hands of the Serbs, which again stirred so much western opinion. But the Bosnian Muslims have themse-lves committed countless crimes against the Serbs for many centuries - and as late as during the Second World War - when they sided with the Nazis. Thus during the recent conflict, they might have got back, in the Hindu meaning as well as the We-stern sense of karma, what they well deserved.

Of all the western media putting pressure on nations which are fighting Muslim fundamentalism, the BBC, which prides itself in its unbiased reporting, has to be singled out for its partiality towards Muslim separatism fr-om all over the world. For the BBC has two standards: onefor the Muslims never mind that they practice a ruthless religion which still teaches them that theirs is only one true God and another for the bad Hindus/Russians/Israelis. It chooses to label Sheikh Abhas, the founder of the dreaded terrorist movement Hamas, a "spiritual leader", when he has ordered numerous bomb attacks against innocent civilians in Israel.

But Hindus, whose history has been of tolerance and of welcoming all persecuted minorities, do not find grace in the eyes of the BBC: at best they are "Hindu nationalists", at worst, "Hi-ndu fanatics". Never mind that they never planted bombs against Muslims, but only destroyed one single mosque without killing anybody in the process, when Mu-slim invaders have razed tens of thousands of temples in India throughout the centuries and slaughtered millions of Hindus.

But is the West mad to put down countries like Yugoslavia or Russia, or India, which are its natural allies and to support nations which are its sworn enemies? Samuel Huntington in hisfamous book The Clash of Civilisations, has predicted that in the 21st century there will be a clash between two civilisations: the West and Islam. Of course, the big question mark is China. He wrote that China, for its own selfish purposes, will sometimes side with Islam against the West.

It has already happened with Pakistan, to whom China not only gave the know-how to develop nuclear weapons, but also missiles to deliver them. But China has its own separatist problems in Sinkiang (which by the way are prodded by Pakistan), and many in India hope that it will bring China closer to India and dissuade her from helping Pakistan. Will it? Some experts are not so sure: China views (and rightly so) India as its enemy number one; because it is the only country which has the numbers and the size (but not the will) to contain China's hegemonic ambitions in Asia. And secondly, China still believes in the efficiency of the iron hand, whether to crush any dissent in Tibet or Sinkiang.

Contrary to China, India is abastion of democracy and like Russia, it is fighting a lone battle against Muslim fundamentalism which surrounds her. And it deserves the support of the West which it is not getting. We have seen how the US prefers to give the benefit of the doubt to General Musharraf, even though Pakis-tan is the biggest supporter of Muslim fundamentalism in South Asia and Mu-sharraf its champion.