Maintain hope, ye who enter!

It's truce time in Sri Lanka. Even though the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has been observing a unilateral ceasefire since Christmas Eve, which the government had reciprocated, the formal ceasefire signed between Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Vellupillai Prabhakaran came into effect on 24 February. This truce deal has been brokered by the Norwegians, and is expected to be monitored by representatives of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Full marks to the warring parties for being able to keep the Only Super Power away from the suddenly quiet battlefield.

The ethnic inferno between the Sinhala majority (14 million) and the Tamil minority (3.2 million) has been raging uninterrupted since 1983. The fire of hatred has left more than 64,500 dead, displaced 1.6 million and left disturbed the entire population. The flames once leaped across the straits and claimed the life of Rajiv Gandhi, then in the prime of his political career.

But will the ceasefire lead to lasting peace? It is too early to tell and the fact is that the last truce in 1995 lasted all of one hundred days, and the fighting got even more ferocious when it disintegrated. However, the chances of accommodation do look brighter this time, as both Wickremesinghe and Prabhakaran represent war-weary sides who now appear to be willing to give peace another chance. The biggest worry at this time is President Chandrika Kumaratunga's reluctance to support the peacefire process. After having helped do the ground work, she now feels left out.

Dante says that the gates of Hell have the legend: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!" Presumably, the gates of Heaven have a statement that is its exact opposite.

The churning within

The militants who abducted and then killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl have inflicted more damage to the Pakistani nation-state than even the worst of its enemies could have done. The killing of Pearl has angered Western society and strengthened the stand of those who greeted General Pervez Musharraf's promise to fight fanaticism with a heavy dose of scepticism. Apart from the fact that the killing of a non-combatant even in a 'jihad' is inherently immoral, the brutal murder of Pearl has also damaged the cause that the fanatical group professes to espouse. Most importantly, however, it puts an obstacle in the path of the general as he tries to de-theocratise Pakistan. Indeed, challenges to General Musharraf have just begun – his fate will be decided by the outcome of his war on fanaticism inside his own country rather than by the troops amassed by India on his eastern frontier.

Further east, the Maoist insurgency of Nepal just got more brutal. The rebels stormed the district headquarters of Achham in far-west Nepal, wiping out a military barrack as well as a police post, and decamped with a loot of more than 20 million rupees and a cache of the army's automatic weaponry. Nearly two hundred people died. Within a week, another police post fell, this time in the central hills, and the swarm of Maoists butchered more than thirty policemen. Even more brutal than these massacres of security personnel (many of whom were executed) was the burning of a bus carrying passengers on their way home for Id-ul-Joha. Among those burned alive were children and women. This outrage seems to have alienated even the Kathmandu intelligentsia, which harbours a soft corner for the rebels bent upon establishing a 'republican' state.

Bhutan is the only country in the region that is cashing in on the success of its quiet diplomacy. The little Himalayan kingdom already has an installed hydropower capacity of about 500 MW; it now wants to add double that in next five years by alluring private Indian investment. With negligible domestic consumption, the Druk nation sells almost all of its power to India. All in all, Thimpu's diplomats enjoy considerable leverage over the establishment in New Delhi. It is this influence that has made the Indian policy-makers exonerate Thimpu of its past human rights violations. Perhaps the peacemakers from Oslo can be persuaded to take a look at the one hundred thousand Lhotshampa refugees expelled by Thimphu a decade ago. Or do mediators prefer warring dissidents rather than those who choose to remain docile refugees?

In the floodplains of Padma, the two warring Begums do not seem to have taken note of the statement of Lyonpo Yeshey Zimba, the finance minister and chairman of the planning commission of Bhutan, that his country has the potential of generating 30,000 MW of hydro-power. That power, especially if it is generated by the market-savvy private sector of India, will directly compete with the natural gas that Bangladesh aims to India some day. Perennially engaged in settling political scores, the two leading ladies of Bangladesh – Khaleda Zia and Shiekh Hasina – are still engaged in the game of trading charges of "selling-out" the moment selling of gas is mentioned. Result? The ruling party (whichever) doesn't want to risk being branded 'traitor', and the natural gas continues to remain where it lies – in the womb of Amar Sonar Bangla. Hope, however, lives in the hearts of Bangladeshi economists and planners who expect to ride to riches (courtesy UNOCAL) once the gas start gushing.

…Bharat Mahan!

The brightest ray of hope this month came from India, where Hindu revivalists lost elections in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had thundered during the campaigning that the Bhartiya Janata Party would win the elections "without the support of Indian Muslims". It may have earned Rajnath Singh some votes among the consuming classes of Lucknow and Varanasi, but his party paid a heavy price in western UP, where Muslims came out in full force to show that with about 150 million followers of Islam living in Hindustan, it remains the second largest Muslim country in the world.

The fact that Bharat is not Hindustan was also being ignored when Ashok Singhal, the fire-breathing chief of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, thundered in turn at Ayodhya: "The country is assert-• ing itself, people want the temple to be built soon!" Oh, really? The simple fact is that the party that looked on with a kindly eye when the Babri Masjid was razed and which tacitly approved of a Ram temple being put up in its place was defeated at the polls. This defeat was almost certainly due to the disenchantment of a significant portion of the populace, and it indicates that there is energy left in the electoral system of India yet. This self-correcting mechanism indicates the limits of Brahminical exclusivism to the political, business and bureaucratic classes of the largest country in South Asia. This is good news for all South Asians, and perhaps the war-monging wallahs will now be tempered? That would be UP's gift to all of us.

While 'the people' were queuing up at the polling booths in Uttar Pradesh, Sir Vidia was being feted by Prime Minister Vajpayee in New Delhi under the aegis of Indian Council for Cultural Relations. Fresh from his Nobel that, in all likelihood, was conferred upon Naipaul for shamelessly pandering to Western prejudices in his writing in his writing, he remained true to form and scoffed at the idea of 'colonialism'. A true 'mimic man', to use his own vivid phrase to describe a fine writer who has chosen to be like a "coconut – brown outside and white inside", Naipual finds merit in Hindu resurgence. Naipaul should read Iqbal's poetry, rather than his pamphlets about Pakistan:

I'll tell you truth, 0 Brahmin, if I may make so bold:

These idols in your temples – these idols have grown old.

From them you have learnt nothing but hatred of those

who share your life

And Allah to His preachers has taught mistrust and strife;

Too long has lain deserted the heart's warm habitation;

Let us build in this homeland a new temple's foundation!

And let our shrine be taller than all shrines of this globe,

With lofty pinnacles touching the skirts of heaven's robe.

At the United Services Institute located inside the Cantonment of New Delhi, 20 budding diplomats of the new Afghanistan are learning to handle the ropes of their trade. Let us hope that the South Asian Afghanistan that will emerge under their leadership will not blow up any more Buddhas and will not ask Hindus to wear saffron bands.