If the focus is, as it should be, on helping the people, a primary condition is to gain the cooperation of the junta and not to provoke it or feed its political suspicions.

Yet Bush persists in calling it the most repressive regime in the world. Aung San Suu Kyi is awarded the Congression Gold Medal. Proposals are made — with no sense of overstepping the mark — to deliver supplies without Burmese permission, a variation of the much-maligned interventionist policy.

The UN itself, seemingly indifferent about compromising its image as a “neutral” international body has “reacted furiously” to the junta’s confiscation of its food supplies.

Laura Bush, whose precise standing in this affair remains obscure, has butted in with her share of routine condemnation which hasn’t gone down well even among the Burmese dissidents abroad. France, ever alert these days to seize any chance of advertising its pro-US credentials has tried to initiate a UN resolution to “impose aid on the Burmese government”.

Yangon, no doubt, hasn’t forgotten that the West-sponsored IAEA nuclear inspection teams in Iraq, included inspectors who were more than what they appeared to be. Nor could it have forgotten that “regime change” by whatever means is a constant in US foreign policy. Aid workers in the main are honest, dedicated but Burmese suspicions are deeply rooted, and every time the West opens its mouth the wrong thing is said and the aid task is made so much more difficult. Why it should be asked, as a footnote, has Suu Kyi maintained an unusual silence?

Believing in loyal definitions
The short answer to the loyalty question Arjun Singh has raised is that it is what you believe it is or what you momentarily proclaim it to be for reasons of political convenience. Loyalty to what or whom? To a person, an ideology, a policy, a party, a family, a coterie?

One sort of loyalty is a commitment to somebody or something right or wrong. That involves a surrender of your own beliefs and convictions if you have any.

Arjun Singh, in effect, has asked for a discussion on the “right standard” for judging loyalty. But there are few things more undefinable than loyalty.

Disloyalty is equally difficult to recognise but is rather more visible than loyalty. In the political world all the participants are assumed, rather too optimistically, to be motivated by some personal convictions and extend their loyalty to a leader who shares them.

Yet others, conveniently unburdened by any commitment, are able to switch their support, as distinguished from loyalty, from one leader to another according to their survival instincts.

All of which also means that “disloyalty” when a policy in which one fervently believes is abandoned is in fact loyalty.

As for coteries, which party anywhere is free of them?

In the best sense of the term the PMO is a coterie consisting of people who are sincerely committed to the Prime Minister.

How all this applies to the Congress or the BJP or any other party seems an exercise in futility and Arjun Singh’s pledge of unending loyalty to the Family suggests that he shouldn’t have raised the matter at all.

Being a hostage  to crises
Is the Kandahar controversy about Jaswant Singh accompanying the freed terrorists or about the terrorists being freed at all? Or about Advani’s claim that he knew nothing at all about what was facing on? The evidence in support of Jaswant Singh that the Kandahar flight was authorised by the Cabinet Committee on Security at which Advani was present is more than persuasive, besides suggesting that Advani’s memory has failed him on this point. But how and why has this affair become so contentious?

Those who take the post-event view that the terrorists should not have been released would have been among the first to damn the leadership if the plane at Kandahar with all its civilian passengers, had blown up. As for Jaswant Singh what could have been the objection to his role of overseeing the transaction? What seems to be ignored on all sides is the point that no hostage taking event is exactly like any other. No rules exist that are applicable to all such crises.

In short the Kandahar fuss is about nothing and perhaps illustrates how relative trivialities are so easily inflated into hot air controversies, particularly in New Delhi’s heady atmosphere.

To identify the sound of chink
IPL continues to unveil one interesting point after another. One was underlined by Vijay Mallya, disappointed by the team’s hapless performance. A point that has always been obvious but which everybody tended to ignore, namely, that there is a near decisive corporate side to the twenty-twenty format. Those who have sunk in their money expect a reasonable return.

A further point that those players who belong to traditional cricket don’t have the defining qualities for the shorter version of the game, and are moreover unable to identify those who have them. Yet another point is that Mallya’s selection of players is as good as anyone else’s.